Strategies for teaching foreign languages

[ticklish_frog]

I am taking classes in Portuguese for some months now. The textbook and the lessons themselves are quite good, but the thing which started to bother me these days --- the approach is quite traditional: we learn the alphabet, then the first unit is devoted to introductions ("Hello. My name is, my gender is, my age is,...), the second one --- how to order food at the restaurant, and so on. It turns out, that we are learning the grammar, local traditions, culture, and all that all the way, no complaints, but apparently foreigners like us (a good chunk of my class consists of people with PhDs and knowing several foreign languages already) the trouble is not in

• Getting food (waiters know foreign languages, because they are interested in clients)
• Communication at work (it's in English anyway)

but rather in

• Communication with local bureaucracy

So, in the ideal world I would like to be taught how to obtain a driver's license, where to go for social security papers, and so on. But alas!