Having taught Spanish for many years, I began with high expectations for a Portuguese textbook. However, reality set in once I discovered that there are really very few textbooks on the market. Initially, I liked the availabilty of the language laboratory via Lingua Text's website; unfortunately, my students complained about having to download Real Audio and using their telephone lines for up to an hour. Lingua Text does offer the lab on Zip disk but students either have to have a Zip drive or they must be able to have a CD made to play on their computer. In either case, students must still have Real Audio installed on their computer. The CD sound quality can be a problem if student computers are old and if the CD player is slow.
On a positive note, Lingua Text has excellent customer service and has always gone out of their way to serve my students' needs. In fact, because of the lab problems, they sent me the language lab on cassette tapes for me to use in our language laboratory on campus. By the way, Lingua Text allows for FREE duplication of the language lab Zip disk/cassette tapes. In addition, the lab and writing manual answer keys are available along with the language lab script.
I plan to use this textbook for the next two years but will continue to search for a better text. I considered a video-based textbook from Georgetown Press but I found them to be rude and unhelpful. Despite its steep price and apparent shortcomings, Brasil! is probably the best all-around text available on the market today.
