Earworms & Elizabeth Smith

As you may have read in the newsletter this month, I’m currently in Portugal. For no particular reason other than it’s the warmest place in Europe at the moment. What it does mean though is that I have to learn Portuguese. Yet another language, and this is one I know absolutely nothing about!

The thing is that my usual recommendations of Michel Thomas or Pimsleur won’t work. Michel Thomas doesn’t have a “learn Portuguese” version and my brain won’t take using Pimsleur for more than one language (and I’ve tried it for Spanish, Italian and Thai already). So I just did the normal thing and googled “learn Portuguese”. It doesn’t half throw up a load of rubbish!

The only semi-decent course I could find was the Unforgettable Languages one. Their system is quite good in that it gives you stories or phrases to help remember words. The problem is that although it is great for reading and comprehension it is almost guaranteed to give you a horrible accent.

So my next stop was Audible.co.uk (I only realised I’d be here 3 days before so needed something in a rush). That did turn up two gems that I hadn’t heard of before.

The first one was “Earworms“. I’d really recommend them. They take the ordinary everyday phrases and put a chillout beat behind it. They also have courses for French, Chinese & Japanese etc. As I mentioned though I bought my course from Audible and to be honest the sound quality is terrible. It may be fine for an average spoken word course, but not for these music based titles, so I’d recommend getting them from Amazon instead…. except I’ve just checked and they don’t have it!

Audible do have a free booklet you can download though.

The other course I found was “One-Day Portuguese: Teach Yourself” by Elizabeth Smith. She has good teaching skills and seems pretty prolific at languages. The course itself has a few jokes and although Ms. Smith comes across as a little “School Ma’amy” it is quite fun. My only concern is the pronunciation, her pronunciation is probably pretty good (if not native of course) but half of the time you are listening to her student, Andy, and to give you a confidence boost, I presume, he usually has a pretty bad accent which of course sticks in your head with several repeats. However I would recommend her course to any teachers as she has lots of good teaching tricks that I’m sure would be useful in class!

The thing that surprised me about both these courses is the amount of content they squeeze into one hour. I’m used to the more thorough approach which takes a lot more time. But I guess I’ll just take the advice I give my students which is to buy as many of these one hour CDs as you can and just listen, listen , listen to them everyday. They’ll stick in your head without having to do all the thinking of a Pimsleur course, and choosing lots of different titles will cover the basics in many different ways and accents which will hopefully iron out any mistakes or problems with any individual course.

Anyway thanks for reading. Obrigado (now is it just me or does that not sound just like “Thank you” in another language?)