Don’t You Know I’m Foco?

Has anyone else tried the interactive version of Português Em Foco?

I decided to get book 4 because I’d heard good things about it, and although I’m sticking with Português Outra Vez for the time being, I thought I’d have a look at the first few pages because I was curious.

The content looks really good. Here I am in the first exercise and straight away it’s giving good, challenging exercises about how the clichés and verbal tics in everyday conversation reflect on underlying cultural attitudes. I’m not finding it easy to use though. For example, in my browser (Chrome) it is basically unusable and I can’t even scroll up and down the text on the screen. So, I got the Blink Learning app, and that seemed to be much better. I can read the text and listen to a guy reading it out, so I was quite happy, but then when I get to the interactive exercises…

I find the layout challenging. I have to write synonyms or explanations for each of the given words of phrases, but the space for text is tiny: I have to write in those tiny white rectangles on the right hand side of the screen! Now, I can do that, but the boxes don’t expand, as far as I can tell, so I can’t see the text as a whole, meaning I can’t check for any typos or anything.

Later, there are interactive exercises based on multiple choice that allow the user to validate the answers chosen, which is great, but there are also pages that need the user to record spoken answers. Well… Fine, but I assume the book doesn’t come with an actual human doing the marking, so when I’ve written or recorded an answer, how will I know whether or not I was correct?

The package only says it is a “Livro aluno e caderno exercícios”, so perhaps it’s expecting me to be paired with a tutor who will hold up that end of things, or that I’ll mark my own homework by also buying the teacher guide, but that seems to negate the idea of it being an interactive book, surely?

I dunno, I’m not feeling very energetic at the moment so maybe I’ll leave it for a day when I have more spoons and then press on to see what happens, but it’s not looking great so far.