Fazendo os exercícios lacunares no livro “Qual É a Dúvida”, deparei com uma palavra desconhecida que me atrapalhou. O objetivo desta questão especifica era decidir se o substantivo precisa, ou não, de um artigo indefinido (um, uma):
“Tenho ______ Malhoa e…. (blábláblá)”
Acabei por deixar vazio o espaço porque achava que “Malhoa” era uma doença qualquer. Confundi-o com maleita, apesar da letra maiúscula. Mas a resposta certa é “um” porque Malhoa era um artista, portanto “um Malhoa” é um quadro pintado por aquele artista. Igualmente em inglês, os ricos dizem “I have a Picasso on my yacht” ou não sei o que é, não sou Jeff Bezos, mas o importante é que “🇬🇧 a Picasso” e “🇵🇹 um Malhoa” têm a mesma forma portanto não é nada difícil!
Mas quem é este gajo, Malhoa?
Segundo a Wikipedia, o artista nasceu em 1855 e começou a sua formação com 12 anos. Fez parte de uma tertúlia de artistas portugueses chamada “O Grupo do Leão”. Apesar de ser pioneiro do movimento naturalista, a sua obra era reconhecida como sendo muito parecida com a corrente artística impressionista que estava muito a moda naquela altura.
Faleceu em 1933 e foi sepultado no Cemitério dos Prazeres. Existe um museu dedicado à sua memória.
Once again I’m indebted to Cristina of “Say it in Portuguese” for correcting the errors in the original draft
I’ve been browsing Lidel for C2 textbooks to work through. They have quite a lot of good options, including some ebooks and interactive content, and I was surprised to find myself spoiled for choice. Unfortuantely, for UK users, even if you only pick downloadable products that don’t need to be posted, when you try to check out this happens!
So I wrote to them and explained that this surely couldn’t apply to virtual products, and even for paper books, Brexit had turned out to be a bit of a “tudo-nada”… Hm, is that the right expression? It was closest I could get to “damp squib”. And that most other book dealers had sussed out by now that their packages wouldn’t be shot down by spitfires on their way across the channel. Looking forward to hearing from them…
Li o segundo livro desta autora há 4 meses e tal, e gostei. Este parece-me um livro mais fraco. Admito que não tenho a idade, nem sou do país nem do género, sobre qual ela está a escrever, portanto provavelmente não me devo queixar (!) mas o álbum consistem em BDs curtinhas mas não há nada novo: algumas não têm graça, são apenas “aconteceu isto”… E concordo: Acontece, sim. Há outros que não entendi. O que se passou? O que é esta coisinha no canto do desenho? Mas também há algumas que bateram certo.
Lembra-me a Sarah Anderson, mas também não gosto da Sarah Anderson. Ai, que desmancha-prazeres sou!
Uma portuguesa que leu este livrinho na escola avisou-me para não ler, mas sou teimoso, e ainda bem porque gostei. Já li muitos livros religiosos em Inglês durante a minha juventude desperdiçada, portanto o estilo não me assustou, ainda que seja ateu.
A história é uma alegoria que acrescenta pormenores à bem conhecida história de São António, que pregou aos peixes uma vez que os moradores da cidade taparam os ouvidos.
O sermão, que o autor coloca na boca do santo, foi muito relevante à situação social em vigor naquela altura e criticou o papel dos colonizadores e missionários no Brasil (contexto que teria perdido se a minha esposa não me tivesse explicado). Em resumo, gostei bastante mas fiquei contente por terminar depois de 60 páginas. Não preciso de mais!
I was sorry to hear Sara Tavares (who I’ve written about on here before) had passed away yesterday. She had been diagnosed with a brain tumour a decade ago, but, as I understand it, had recovered. It seems to have come back recently, which I wasn’t aware of and I was shocked to hear she was dead.
Forty five is no age, and it’s a great loss to music. I hadn’t realised previously that she was also a former eurovision entrant, as well as all those awards and collaborative projects. She really achieved a lot.
I’m off reddit these days so I’ve gone feral and all my book reviews for the time being are going to be accompanied by the #uncorrectedportugueseklaxon This one is “Enquanto Salazar Dormia” by Domingos Amaral
Este livro é muito interessante. Já sabia, antes de ler, que Lisboa era um covil de espiões mas quanto mais o enredo desenrolou, mais achava que precisava de mais informações, portanto ouvi um outro audiolivro (em inglês) sobre esta época. Com este como pano de fundo, esta história tornou-se mais viva, com tantas referências à história verdadeira da segunda guerra mundial.
Há imensas cenas de sexo rebuscadas, e cada vez que uma mulher entra no âmbito da história, o narrador avalia o tamanho e a aparência dos seios dela o que se tornou irritante depois de algum tempo, mas apesar disso a história é divertida.
Vacilei entre 3 e quatro estrelas mas acabei por dar 3 porque o desenlace roubou tanta emoção dum filme alheio (o Casablanca, que também aparece na capa) e achei este truque um pouco preguiçoso.
Hey, I didn’t tell you about my trip to Islington to see Manuel Cardoso’s gig, did I? I should do it in Portuguese, really, but my brain is still broken and I’m still feeling pretty terrible with the… cold or the sinus infection or whatever it is, so I’m going to take the coward’s way out and write in english instead.
The venue is called The Bill Murray and it’s near The Angel, one of my favourite parts of town, behind the Union Chapel. You have to get off Essex Road and go down a few very boring roads to get to the actual spot though. It’s like a small pub with the back room converted into a venue that holds maybe a hundred people on small chairs around a low square stage about five feet by five. I got there quite early and sat down at the side of the room, but it started to fill up and I moved to allow a couple to sit together. That left me in one of the only remaining empty chairs: right at the edge of the stage where I could reach out and touch the mic stand if I wanted to. I could hear people talking english, including the announcer. I started thinking, well, I guess the show’s going to be in english. Disappointing.
It wasn’t though! As soon as he came on, he started in portuguese, but he read the room and asked “por palmas” , (by round of applause) how many portuguese people were in. Then he asked had anyone brought a non-portuguese friend with them who didn’t speak the language. A few boyfriends were pointed at and raised their hands sheepishly. There might have been a few who had come on their own and didn’t even understand the question but we’ll never know. Anyway, he told them they were in for a rough ride and gave them a joke in english – an off-colour gag about Ronaldo – and then went back to his routine. I was really, really close to where he was standing and I felt a bit self conscious. If I looked completely baffled I was going to stand out like a sore thumb at that range, so I made sure not to let my expression go slack at any point.
I actually understood most of it though, thank god. Obviously, he was talking fast, using a lot of slang, and talking about things that would only make sense if you were steeped in the culture, so there were definitely gaps, but I laughed extra-loudly at the jokes I actually got, partly because they were funny, and partly because I was so happy to have understood them. I was especially glad to get the ones that made reference to pop culture memes: “My sex life is like Leiria. It exists, but it’s not that amazing” for example. Or politics “João Galamba was found to have weed in his house… well, at last we have a politician ‘sem filtro'”.
Sometimes, I got the words but not why it was funny. Like there was a stretch where he was pretending to be a lovestruck man talking to his girlfriend on the phone and I laughed at alost every protestation of love he made, but one of the compliments he gave her was that her breasts were like chips ahoy cookies. Er… OK…
Other times, I totally missed the reference. Like, at one point everyone in the room did that sort of wincing laughter, you know, when someone makes a really near-the-knuckle joke. He was already doing a routine about kidnapping children, which I wasn’t really vibing with, but people seemed to be enjoying, but he said something about you can’t just walk into the Hotel da Luz and steal a baby. “Now, the Praia de Luz, on the other hand…” I didn’t get it straight away but obviously should have guessed it was a Madeleine McCann reference. That’s an example where you’d probably laugh from the shock value if the timing was right, but if you’re on a slight delay while your brain processes it, the effect is lost.
The whole thing was over pretty quickly: started at 6.30 and finished by 7.30. I really enjoyed it though, and I definitely want to do this again. I must follow more comedians on instagram so I can see when their tours are coming up.
I mentioned a while ago that I was starting the Say it in Portuguese CAPLE Exam Prep course. I thought it would be worth taking a really focussed course to try and get myself match fit instead of winging it. In case anyone is in the same boat, thinking of taking it for a future exam, here’s what it’s like:
The course took place over 4 weeks because that’s how long I had from enquiring to the date of the exam. Following an introductory meeting, Cristina offered a range of three options, based on what I said my weak points were. There were different levels/prices, depending how much support I wanted and I went with the middle one. I won’t say what the prices were in case it’s a trade secret, but I’d definitely call it very good value.
As you might already know, there are four sections in the exam*, and I felt reasonably comfortable with the reading comprehension but decidedly iffy about some of the others, so the really important stuff for me was in the form of four weekly drops of one sample paper from the written part of the exam and a recording and set of multiple choice questions from the aural comprehension section. I completed them in my own time and emailed them back. Very detailed feedback would then arrive the following day for me to work through.
On Fridays we had an online meeting where we’d go through some of the homework feedback and also did a simulated parts 1 and 2 of the “produção e interação orais” exam format. Mistakes made in the meeting would prompt more feedback via email, including actually recording the lesson and doing a step-by-step feedback recording that I could listen to and hear my mistakes.
Cristina does other courses and she’s also host of one of the earliest portuguese podcasts, so she’s an experienced teacher, but I think I was one of the early adopters on this specific DAPLE course, and there were a couple of teething troubles – a few typos in the questions – which I fed back and will no doubt have been corrected by the time the next person takes the course. In the post-exam debrief, I also suggested she might change the order the aural papers were given in, since I think the first one was a real past paper and the later ones were close simulacra. They were very good recordings and sounded almost exactly like real exam questions, but the questions were a tiny bit less ambiguous and tricksy, so I thought maybe it would be better to start with those and finish on the real past paper.
The course definitely boosted my confidence and helped me approach the exercises in a more controlled, less panicky way. Yeah, the exam could have gone better, but it could have gone worse too, and it definitely would have if I hadn’t done the course! I would definitely recommend it to anyone planning on taking a CAPLE exam, especially if you’ve never taken one before and are not familiar with the format.
Yesterday was the day of the DAPLE (C1) exam. Usually when I do one of these exams I write it up straight away, but I’ve left it till the next day because I was feeling a bit miserable. It all went a bit piriform, I’m afraid. Let’s take it step by step:
I arrived at the embassy half an hour early. Better than half an hour late, I suppose, but they don’t open the gates till nine. No exceptions. Even when their own staff arrived the secrity guy wouldn’t answer the buzzer till nine sharp. I was in need of a wee, and I had a congested nose, so being out in the cold did not help at all. And then a brazilian and a…. venezuelan(?) guy arrived and started speaking spanish. I tried to ignore them. I don’t need to hear spanish today, lads!
When we were let in, she showed my to a nice reception room – much nicer than the noisy, echoey office the exams have been held in previously. I was the only student there, so I was just sat at a table, with the invigilator about fifteen feet away at a different table. My face was bunged up, I had to breathe through my mouth a lot of the time, and I had to keep blowing my nose noisily.
The Compreensão da Leitura went well. 90 minutes, 60 marks. There were some extracts from articles about modern life: an overview of the work of António Damásio and a missing paragraph exercise based on a story about how portuguese kids coped with remote learning during lockdown. The missing paragraph thing is quite annoying: it soaks up a lot of time for only 5 marks. I was worried that I was behind schedule but of course it was fine: The last 40 marks are fill-in-the-blank questions, which are much quicker than the ones where you have to read the text, so you don’t have to be strict about hitting one mark every minute and a half. It was definitely challenging, but I had done the preparation and I reckon I got most of the marks.
Break. Water, toilet, blow nose, eat a square of chocolate, suck a menthol sweetie.
Next came the Produção e Interação Escrita. 90 minutes, 3 exercies. I found myself getting writer’s block at first, suddenly doubting my spelling of almost every word. I wrote a formal letter to the local council, telling them they shouldn’t close the library, recycling as much from the question itself as I possibly could.
Next up was a discussion stemming from this article from the Expresso (the section beginning “O problema não é a ansiedade dos jovens quanto o futuro…”). I decided to branch off in the middle and talk about George Bernard Shaw’s novel “Back to Methuseleh” which takes as its premise that if you could only extend the human lifespan to hundreds of years then everyone would suddenly be incentivised to really work at dealing with entrenched, long-term social problems. This seemed like quite a fun diversion: the trouble with always having to write about environmental issues is that it can feel a bit preachy, so I was glad I made it more interesting. Generally, if you bore the marker they are less likely to give you the benefit of the doubt. With hindsight, I think I might have confused some of the plot points with “The Trouble with Lichen” by John Wyndham, which is also about extending human life, but never mind; I doubt the marker will have read both, so I think I’m pretty safe.
The third of the three exercises was the usual mechanical rewriting of sentences into different forms: passing direct to indirect speech, switching in and out of subjunctive and using gerunds. I’ve done a shit-ton of fiddly grammar exercises lately in Qual é a Dúvida: about a hundred pages of them, in fact, so I felt really confident about my answers. Done, dusted, 5 minutes left over, so I skimmed the first and second texts, strafing the errors. Some really stupid ones! Probably saved myself about ten lost marks there.
Break. Water, toilet, blow nose, eat a square of chocolate, suck a menthol sweetie.
Hey, well, it’s all going well so far right, as the optimist said as he fell past the thirteenth floor.
Next up was squeaky bum time: the Compreensão do Oral, which is always everyone’s least favourite. It’s 40 minutes and 25 points. I have done six of these for practice recently and was starting to feel quite confident, so I just tried to stick to my new system and keep a cool head. I couldn’t though – I felt like I was swimming around in a sort of soup of words. And the questions were really ambiguous too, For example, there was a passage about the rehabilitation of the Iberian Lynx (I can’t find the exact recording but here’s a podcast that deals with the same situation). At one point he talks about a kind of rabbit called the Coelho Bravo which he said was essential to the Lynx because it was so specialised that the Coelho Bravo was “almost its only food” but he didn’t say what else it ate. The answers included one that just said it was “essential” and one that said it was essential because it was the lynx’s “only food”. I didn’t like the first because it’s not specific enough about why the rabbit is essential, but the second seemed to be overstepping the mark so I played it safe and stuck with the first.
Then there was one about wolves in portugal (I’ve listened to an audiobook about them, but it didn’t help much I’m afraid), a section from this interview with the author of a book called “Adeus Futuro”. The invigilator told me afterwards that even she couldn’t answer the questions for this section (cool cool cool cool cooooool).
And finally an interview with friend of the blog Marco Neves. I’ve read one of his books, actually had another of his books on order at the time, and I once did a course he taught so I have a pretty good idea of the way he thinks. And Ainda bem, because the fourth question in the section was about a specific word – I can’t remember what it was but it began with “des” and the question was about whether the des- was there to reinforce the root word or contradict it. I didn’t catch it the first time around so I listened out for it really carefully the second time and I swear, dead ass, as the young folk say, that he didn’t bloody say it. I mean, I know he must have, but I didn’t hear. I made an educated guess, but I dunno. I was gutted. I’ve been scoring 17-20/25 lately and I’d be surprised if I got 15 in this. Horrifying.
Break. Water, toilet, blow nose, eat a square of chocolate, suck a menthol sweetie, say, when asked how I am, that I just want to die.
The final part of the exam is the shortest, but it’s quite nerve-wracking because it’s recorded on video: Produção e Interação Orais. 25 minutes, and you’d think it would feel like hours, but it doesn’t, it feels like about twelve seconds. With hindsight, I wish I’d written some reminders to myself on a card about controlling the rate at which I speak, and slipped it into my backpack. so I could have read it before that part of the exam and refocus my thoughts before the real thing.
Again, I’d spent quite a bit of time preparing for this and I had developed an apresentação which I hadn’t memorised but reckoned I could use all or part of in talking about myself. Weirdly, though, she didn’t really give me much room to expand on my answers. It was just Where were you born, where do you live now, how long have you lived here, how long have you been learning portuguese and a few other things. I even got cut off if I said too much. Gutted! I’d been prepared to give my silly discussion of running in the park, talk about the books I’ve read and maybe even get into talking about the comedian I’d seen on the previous evening, but I didn’t get a chance. My answers were fine, but I thought this would be my chance to shine and it wasn’t.
Me trying to finish my Apresentação before embrassy security throws me out in the gutter
The next part of the interaction is a visual prompt and I was handed most boring picture in the world, with two men and a woman sitting at a desk and almost no other objects visible in the shot. I talked about meetings and how a lot of work meetings were happening online now, and how I quite liked that as an introvert. I did some light-hearted banter about what it’s like when you’re trying to write an email and someone says your name but you have no idea what they are asking you because you weren’t listening. Not exactly comedy gold but it was reasonably grammatically correct. I suspect there were a lot of Umms in there though. I hadn’t quite filled the time, so she gave me a follow-up question: did I think there was a gender pay gap in the workplace. Oh shit, I thought, was that what I was supposed to talk about? Women in the workplace? Oh well, I started saying it depended on the specific company and that in my industry, social services, women were really well represented in senior positions, but that was as far as I got because we hit the time limit again. Probably just as well, really, I don’t normally want to give pat answers so I think I would have got into lifetime earnings after that and come a cropper on the vocabulary.
Lastly, we had to do an interaction about starting an export business. Normally, you’d do this with another student but since there weren’t any, it was me and the invigilator, with a third person taking notes. Why did they need to take notes when it was all on camera? I dunno.
The scenario was that I wanted to export olive oil and she had to persuade me to export cork instead. Wha’? What do I know about the relative profitability of those things? I didn’t really follow the sequence properly and kept fighting my corner even though the script said I was supposed to agree with her in the end. I finally took the hint but I was in the middle of saying that my wife has lots of bags but she doesn’t have one made of cork, so I turned on a dime and said that, now I thought about it, maybe I’d but her a nice cork bag. Except I started a clause with “talvez”, and the subjunctive circuits of my brain creaked into action, creaked to a halt again and I remember really clearly hearing myself entone in slow motion… “de…ver….ia…” and knowing it was wrong but just feeling so out of control at this point that I didn’t even try and correct myself. Feck.
They stopped the tape and asked me if I felt it had gone well and I said no, definitely not and I stood up. They asked me some more things while I was gathering my pens, stuffing menthol sweeties into my mouth, nose and ears and wriggling my coat on. I coudn’t even string a sentence together. At one point, I turned to them both and said “Juro que falo melhor do que…” and then couldn’t even think how to finish the sentence. Oh well, the recording had stopped so whatever.
I had lunch in Comptoir Libonais, then home, where I watched a movie and had some more nice food. First booze in months, too, but I’d earned it. Nose still streaming. Finished the rest of the menthol sweeties. Oh and there was a parcel. It was that Marco Neves book I’d ordered. God is mocking me.
Well, I guess it could be worse. There were some real low points but it could be a lacklustre pass. I’m not even pausing, I’m going to set my sights on DUPLE in May and start work now. I know I’ve said this many times before, but I absolutely have to talk more. I’ll never get there if I can’t talk naturally.
I think I’ve mentioned this girl before, and she’s well worth watching. This story in particular struck me because I’d never heard of the bloke but he really seems to be something of a national phenomenon.
Luso 