Mark Davies (1)

If you are learning Portuguese and you wish to learn the common words before the rare ones (as I do), look no further. Unlike various frequency lists on the internet, this book takes all the forms of a word (e.g. verb conjugations and m/f/pl forms of adjectives and nouns) and sorts them into a single entry. But beware, this book has two big failings.

1) It does not follow the spelling reform that went into effect in 2009 (not surprising since it was published in 2007). Hence, it lists non-standard words such as acção, actividade, and óptimo.

2) It is useless as a dictionary. Many words have multiple meanings, sometimes corresponding to different parts of speech, but only one sample sentence is given. If you want to really understand how to use a particular word, this book is not thorough enough to help you.

This book is only good for telling you which words to learn in what order. Since it fails to explain the meanings of the words well, you will just end up going to a proper dictionary. Thus, if I were the publisher, I would either eliminate any attempt at explanation, giving mere a glossary of words in order of frequency that the reader can use to guide their learning (but then that wouldn't be much of a book), or I would include the glossary along with a proper dictionary definition to go with each word rather than just a single sentence.… (mehr)