With EuroTalk’s Talk Now! Learn Portuguese for beginners you learn in a game-like enviroment reminiscent of Monte Carlo, Atlantic City, or Las Vegas. Did you ever imagine learning Continental Portuguese could be so much fun? Well, it is.
This language course for beginners has a target audience of students, families, travelers, business people, and vacationers. Talk Now! Learn Portuguese claims nothing more than to teach “essential words and phrases for absolute beginners,” and does it so well. Talk Now! Learn Portuguese has taken the school out of learning, and has given the lessons a game show quality so that you hardly realize that you are quickly acquiring language knowledge.
Talk Now! Learn Portuguese targets the novice in the language who plans to travel to Portugal for a short period of time. With this course, you are not going to have conversations in Portuguese, but it will get you where you need to be. Talk Now! Learn Portuguese clues you in to your immediate needs and surroundings in a language that is not yours. In the end, the Portuguese people will understand you and you will understand them on a very basic level. Pronunciation and word/phrase recognition is what this course is all about.
What's Hot:
What’s Hot is that I had no reason whatsoever to contact support. Remember, there is the email address for technical support and the Read Me link on the first screen of Talk Now! Learn Portuguese.
What's Not: For a company that produces so many different levels of language software in over 100 languages, I would have thought there would be a toll free number for more immediate access to technical support other than their email address at support@eurotalk.co.uk. What's Hot: Talk Now! Learn Portuguese was so easy to install on my computer with Windows XP that I was ready to start my lessons (games) before I even realized it. All I had to do was put the CD in the drive and close it. On auto-run, Talk Now! Learn Portuguese was installed. The only thing I had to do was choose whether I wanted the default option or to customize it. I chose the default.
The Installation instructions are located at the top of the inside front leaf of the dust jacket for the booklet and CD encasement. On the first screen of Talk Now! Learn Portuguese, there is a Read Me button on the left-hand side if there are any issues. You can also send a message to technical support at support@eurotalk.co.uk.
What's Hot:
The user interface is great. It is easy navigation the entire way. Just remember that in every section for studying (gaming), click on the question mark icon for the instructions to the exercise. Follow the instructions and you can’t go wrong. The only exit from Talk Now! Learn Portuguese, that I found, was on the very first screen. The pink button at the bottom of the left-hand side, with the icon of a running man on it facing the left , is your way out of it.
What's Hot: On the Selections for Practice screen, there are First Words, Food, Colors, Phrases, Body, Numbers, Time, Shopping, and Countries. In each one of these selections, you will find Easy Games, Hard Games, and the Picture Print Out Dictionary. Easy Games consists of learning words/phrases in pronunciation practice, and Hard Games involves word/phrase recognition when they are spoken, complete with pictures or icons of them.
On the Selections for Practice screen, there is a green button on the right-hand lower side strictly for Easy and Hard Games that is independent of the main study area. There is another interesting button at the very top of the left-hand side, of the Selections for Practice screen, that shows how many points you have accumulated and how many more points you will need to get to the awards area.
This is “Intelligent” software that remembers your mistakes and brings them back to you for practice until perfect. The “Intelligent” software is like the unrelenting teacher who never forgets, or the dealer who remembers every play you have made.
At center bottom there are three buttons. The first one has WWW written on it. Click it and it takes you to EuroTalk’s web site. The second button, with the icon of the flying flag on it, lets you set the program in your native language for all instructions. The third button, with the icon of a man on it, lets you customize who your narrators will be. Choose between a nice young Portuguese couple with bright eyes and smiles that never end, or hip mannequins.
What's Hot:
Not once did the Talk Now! Learn Portuguese program lock up on me. Moreover, I put it through some rigorous tests with speech pronunciation and recording, along with choosing selections rapidly. It ran smoothly from beginning to end, much to my surprise. It could also be, I do confess, that I might have been having too much fun with Talk Now! Learn Portuguese to even notice.
For what this software proposes, I cannot think of anything that would enhance it. Anything else might actually be detrimental to it.
EuroTalk’s Talk Now! Learn Portuguese is a software program that teaches basic Continental Portuguese to beginners by using gaming and TV game show formats so that the learning part becomes fun and competitive. The learning goes unnoticed in the quest for points and awards. I would recommend Talk Now! Learn Portuguese not only to people who want to learn Continental Portuguese, but to people who want to have some fun in general.
So far, I have seen no other products of this particular genre.