Now that I’ve finished Qual É A Dúvida I’ve returned to the bloody awful, boring “Português Outra Vez“, aimed at C1/C2 level students. On the face of it, there’s no reason it should be so dull: both books are just page after page of exercícios lacunares (missing word problems), but they’ve ordered it into three sections and within each section they’re all the same *kind* of missing words. I’m currently part way through 60 pages of verb+preposition. I have a copy of the Guia Prático de Verbos com Preposições for any that I don’t already know. Helena Ventura is co-author of both books, so the examples are often quite similar.
Now, that much repetition could be useful if it was drilling the variations of dar+preposition or passar+preposition but there’s surprisingly little repetition of those. Dar appears just twice, I think, and ser, passar, ficar seem only to be there once. Instead we’re doing easy things like gostar de, precisar de, plus some fairly obscure ferns that only ever take one preposition anyway. It’s not ideal and I am finding it much harder to stay motivated. I’ll see how it goes but I might just open a window and fling it at the pigeons outside.
The other two sections are expressões idiomáticas and vocabulário. I feel like this is all good meat-and-potatoes stuff, necessary for building core competencies for the advanced exam, so I hope the pigeons enjoy it.
More practically, I suppose I should hope between sections to break up the monotony or something.
Aaaaanyway, enough moaning. I’m writing out some that I got wrong, hoping they’ll stick in my mind better:
Não Conseguimos convencê-lo; ele torce pelo Benfica e não muda de ideias. I got torcer por, but failed to realise that Benfica needed a definite article. Torcer por =Ser adepto de = to be a supporter of
Todas as pessoas devem ser compassiva e solidárias, olhando a quem está em situação de pobreza e depende da ajuda dos outros. Again, i got the right formula – olhar a – but I used the imperativo. That probably would have worked if there were a full stop after “solidárias” but it doesn’t make sense as it is and I should have rethought it. Olhar a =ter em consideração =to look out for
Quantas costeletas tocam a cada pessoa? Parecem-me poucas para tanta gente. I had no clue here and just guessed badly. Tocar a = calhar a =to… Hm, it’s a difficult one to translate neatly but the whole sentence is like “How many cutlets are there for each person”. It can also mean “to have to do with” or “to compete for”
O António foi falar com o chefe e foi pedir-lhe pela colega da receção, para que o chefe a promovesse, pois ela merecia. I got the wrong end of the stick with this one. I didn’t realise Antonio was a worker in the same firm. I thought he was a customer who was recommending the receptionist for promotion. Conseqiently I messed it up. Pedir por =interceder a favor de= to ask on behalf of, to act as an intermediary.
Há pessoas tão ambiciosas que não olham a meios para atingir os fins. I missed the relevance of this. And used “ser contra” instead. Olhar a =atender a = care about. So in this case they don’t care what means they have to use to achieve their ends. We’ve all met people like that, eh? Some people are so ambitious to be a good portuguese students they will even stoop to doing the actual exercises diligently.
Não compares um Ferrari com um Toyota! São completamente diferentes! I used a in place of com. Classic overliteral translation from English. Compare x WITH y, not x TO y. Comparar com = colocar em igualdade com =Make a comparison. The way this is phrased implies that the comparison will always be of equality, but priberam is much closer to the English notion of comparing. Ie, you can make an unfavourable comparison, but even though “this is a million times better than that” is a comparison, people will often be opposed to you comparing Shakespeare to Dan Brown or whatever, feeling that Shakespeare is somehow demeaned by being spoken of in the same breath as such a terrible writer, and I assume that’s what’s going in in the example.
Luso 
Can you take a picture of the exercises in Português Outra Vez? I’m quite curious what they’re like now you’ve complained about them so much.
Also I wanted to recommend some other Portuguese resources I’ve been using a lot recently. They all have lessons based around short authentic materials (either listening or reading) with exercises, grammar and cultural explanations and glossaries.
DLI GLOSS
https://gloss.dliflc.edu/
This is showing as down right now but it should be back up soon. It’s the US government website for military linguists to train their skills. It has Brazilian and European Portuguese and uses a different ability scale to CEFR (1 is A2, 1+ is B1, 2/2+ is B2, 3/3+ is C1, 4/4+ is C2).
NFLC Portal (National Foreign Language Center)
https://portal.nflc.umd.edu/lessons
Another American resource, does require you to create an account but it’s free. This site divides Portuguese into Brazilian, European and African variants.
Lectia app
https://nflc.umd.edu/projects/lectia
This is an app by the same organisation as above but it seems to be different lessons, well optimised for the mobile. They don’t separate Portuguese by dialects but mostly seem to only have Brazilian Portuguese as far as I can tell.
Anyway, I’ve found them really useful to do intensive studying of authentic materials, and are also good for students who aren’t at a high enough level to just jump straight into native content. I’ve done all the Portuguese reading exercises for the beginner level on Lectia and level 1-2 EUPT lessons on DLI.
I have a question. Do you think it would be best to avoid Brazilian Portuguese lessons from these resources in my situation?
I just took the B1 DEPLE test recently and all of my coursebooks are European Portuguese as Portugal is closer to me than Brazil. I’ve been avoiding Brazilian courses in the beginning stages as I didn’t want to to get confused with grammar/pronunciation but I’m wondering now if it’s safe to add lessons from the above resources. There was a lesson on Lectia where they taught “Precisar + verb” which is different to “Precisar de + verb” which I’ve learnt in my European Portuguese sources, which makes me a little bit worried.
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Thanks. I’ll take a closer look and reply properly in the morning 😊
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Oof! Well, it turned into evening, not morning, for reasons that’ll be obvious if you saw the blog post from a few hours ago!
To be honest, I am probably being a bit hard on “Português Outa Vez”. Maybe it’s just my hang-up that it seems to have three themes and three themes only, but they are core C1/C2 materials so maybe that’s a good thing, I should just try hopping from section 1 to 2 to 3 and back again, doing a few exercises from each to break it up a bit.
The first section deals with idiomatic expressions. Here’s a sample page (of about 50 pages in the section)
Then there is a 60-page section on verbs with prepositions. Sample pages
And finally about 50 pages aimed at stretching your vocabulary
I found it frustrating because it doesn’t really teach you the material, so if you get a page full of expressions you essentially just have to google them and figure out the answers and write them in. After about 50 times, that sort of thing gets pretty old, and you look through the material and think wow, I’ve done 2 pages and there are 48 to go… Oof!
I’m sure this has a lot to do with mental attitude though. If you have more resilience than I do you might really enjoy it! I’d probably suggest Portugues Atual, I think (linked on this page, along with everything else I’ve ever used https://lusobritish.blog/best-books-and-audiobooks-for-learning-portuguese/ )
As for Brazilian, I think the answer probably depends on whether you think you’ll need to speak to many brazilians. It’s definitely worth knowing the differences exist (Did you see this, for example? https://lusobritish.blog/2022/03/22/brazilian-portuguese/). I’ve read a couple of books by people like Jorge Amado (https://lusobritish.blog/2023/09/08/capitaes-da-areia-de-jorge-amado-opiniao/) and Clarice Lispector (https://lusobritish.blog/2018/03/23/opiniao-a-hora-da-estrela-de-clarice-lispector/) and both are great and helped me get used to the idea that they have different ways of writing certain things, but I think drilling yourself with exercises is probably too much: you’ll get used to writing that way, which I think would be confusing, especially if you are planning on taking exams.
On the other hand, of course, if you are planning to spend time in Brazil then there’s definitely more of a case for getting used to that way of doing it!
The sites look good. I’m going to be updating my online resource pages in a little while and might include these if that’s OK…? Happy to credit you and if you have any sort of online blog, page or social media you’d like me to link to so people can find you, let me know!
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Ah yeah I can see how it would be too much to do 60 pages of exercises just for verbs with prepositions. Thank you for the pics and the info though!
I’ve been using Português Atual 2 and it’s good but I do find it difficult to figure out some of the expressions even with the Portuguese explanation so I’ve had similar issues with googling a lot to try to figure out exactly what something means.
Yeah, good point about avoiding drilling with exercises. I have no idea if I passed the B1 exam (fingers crossed), might need to take it again! My uses for Portuguese right now are mostly limited to vacationing in Portugal so I’ll focus on that.
No problem! I don’t have a site but I want other people to know about good resources. Good luck with your studies!
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Thanks – and you too!
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