Elementary, Pre-Intermediate, Intermediate and Advanced
Elementary course
The Elementary course – It will introduce students to listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. On this level students will master essential grammar structures, pronunciation, basic vocabulary and phrases. Conversation will emphasize the development of vocabulary and Portuguese grammar skills necessary for basic conversation (including telephone calls, shopping, daily routine, family, job, etc.). Already on this level our students learn how to ask and answer questions using 4 verbal tenses in the indicative mood of verbs ended in -AR simultaneously in one lesson! Here are they: simple present, simple past, present continuous and going to – future. After finishing this course students can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and basic phrases and interact in a simple way.
Pre-Intermediate course
The Pre-Intermediate course – It will further develop vocabulary, and introduce students to more complex sentence structure and higher level grammatical skills focusing on speaking. The main objective of this course is to enhance the students’ abilities to converse on a variety of topics such as restaurant, parts of the body, transportation, directions, city, weather, etc. On this level, students will learn again 4 verbal tenses also in the indicative mood simultaneously in one lesson as on the previous level, but with verbs end in -ER and -IR. Besides that, they will learn prepositions and prepositional phrases. At the end of this level students will be able to converse in daily situations out of the class by using the structures learned in class.
Intermediate course
The Intermediate course – The main objective of this course is to enhance the students’ abilities to converse freely on a variety of topics such as work, travelling, study, leisure time, etc. Students will concentrate on speaking freely, reading and listening. This is the most difficult level at Português Carioca due to the amount of grammar structures involving different verbal tenses, such as the imperfect and the subjunctive mood(the most difficult verbal tense for students to understand). Students also learn parts of a sentence, connectives, etc. At the end of this course students will be able to hold a conversation in various situations outside the classroom as well as construct long sentences using more complex words and grammar.
Advanced course
The Advanced course – On this level it’s assumed that students have achieved all the basic as well as the more complex grammatical skills, and are able to use language in a wider cultural context. Advanced students can understand the main ideas of complex texts on different topics and can communicate on a variety of more complex topics such as personality, communication and media, culture, etc. They learn passive voice, direct and indirect speech, etc. After finishing this course students will be able to speak Portuguese fluently in all kinds of situations. We encourage students to practice Portuguese as much as they can in order to improve the learned language skills, as for the process of learning a language be complete, it is necessary to practise it continuously.