Learn Portuguese - Absolute Beginner (Lessons 1 to 25 with Audio) 2.2

It is a comprehensive application for anyone who is in the process of learning Portuguese. As its name suggests, the app was designed for those who are just starting with the learning process.

In its 25 lessons, the student will be able to hear and then study in detail a conversation between a professional language teacher and an accomplished learner. These roles are played by professional voice actors, so the quality of the recordings is great. Each of the situations in the lessons takes place during different situations, which are described at the beginning of each lesson.

Lesson 1, named "Portuguese Party Icebreaker" teaches a formal and informal greeting which takes place in an airplane. The main audio file plays the entire conversation at full speed, and then it breaks it down slowly. The conversation is repeated several times to help you retain its contents. After listening to the lesson file one full time or even while you are listening it, you can access a lot of information about it in the lesson window. It is divided into six different tabs: Overview, Transcript, Vocabulary, Expansion, Grammar and Cultural. For the lesson to work, you are supposed to review all these tabs after listening to the lesson. And you should, because there is a lot of useful information to be found there. The Transcript tab is my favorite, because it breaks down the dialogs and lets you listen to individual sentences. In the Expansion tab, you can find similar sentences to those used in the lesson.

In conclusion, Learn Portuguese Absolute Beginner is a great tool for anyone who is starting to learn Portuguese. After completing all the lessons, you should have quite a few phrases in your arsenal. There is a lot of interesting content in this application and everything that is said in the lesson's audio files is then explained in written form. The only problem that I had with the application is that the pop-up audio player seemed to disappear after I clicked on another window. So I had to fish it out using Exposé. This wasn't really a big deal but it was a bit annoying at times.