Category: English

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Key Learnings 5 – Gender Rannygazoo

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I haven’t blug for a while. Blug is the past tense of blog, right? Anyway, while I have been in silent mode, I’ve been involved in a group discussion on Hellotalk run by a Portuguese friend. There are a few Portuguese-learners in there and it’s interesting to see how the conversation evolves.

Now, normally, I mention my own failings in conversation, but in this case, someone else made a mistake that I thought was really interesting and I definitely would have made it too if I’d been trying to say the same thing, so I’m writing about it to help cement the knowledge in my brain. What he said was

Eu tenho dupla nacionalidade, Americano e Português

The correction came back as

Eu tenho dupla nacionalidade, Americana e Portuguesa

Weird. He’s a bloke, so why is it “Americana” and not “Americano”? Well, the answer is that nacionalidade is a noun in its own right and the way the sentence is structured, it’s his nationality that is described as American, not him. Since nacionalidade is feminine, it becomes “Americana”. If he had said

Eu tenho dupla nacionalidade. Sou Americano e Português

that would have been OK, because in that sentence the adjective is applied to him directly. I was taken aback at first, because we anglophones are so used to not having to think about this stuff, but when you think about it, it makes sense, and opens up a little window into how the language works.

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Língua Dos Pês

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I mentioned a little while ago that I was intrigued by a Luisa Sobral song called “Língua Dos Pês”, which means “The Language of Ps” or if you prefer “P Language”. As it turns out, this is a song with a back-story. It’s a made-up language, similar to the Pig Latin or Egg-language (aka Eggy-Peggy or Egglish) that you might be familiar with if you went to the right school. It isn’t a proper language or even a secret code, more of a language game you can play just for the fun of it.

Like everything else in Portuguese, it has a European and a Brazilian variant. As you know, this blog is fully on-side with Europe, so we’ll stick to that. Basically, all you need to do is repeat each syllable of each word, but with a P at the start, either before the vowel or in place of the consonant. So for example the name of Luisa’s album is also her first name, Luisa, which, in Língua dos Pês is Lu–Pu–I–Pi–Sa–Pa.

It sounds quite nice in Portuguese:

da-pa ten-pen-ta-pa-ção-pão son-pon-o-po-ra-pa de-pe u-pu-ma-pa me-pe-tá-pá-for-por-a-pa*

which is why she is able to sing a song in it, but it’s awkward in English:

He-pe-llo-po My-py name-pame is-pis Col-pol-in-pin

and similarly, eggy-peggy sounds like a disaster in Portuguese

Peggor eggexeggempleggo eggestegga freggasegge

And it gets worse if you use the actual Portuguese word for egg:

Povoor ovoexovoemplovoo ovoestovoa frovoasovoe

Geggood legguck preggoneggouncegging theggat!

It’s interesting that certain types of language game suit specific languages better than others, although I admit I don’t know quite what it means.

OK, are you ready to look at that video again? Well, the one I posted last time, from the children’s TV show “Panda and Friends” was pretty toe-curling, but there’s a much better version here in an an interview with O Observador. She talks a bit about the track and the album in general, then starts singing Língua Dos Pês at about 5:42 and carries on with “Onde Foi o Avô?” (“Where did Grandpa go?”) and her single “João”.

If you need any help, there’s a translation of the song here but only into straightforward Portuguese. You’ll have to do the rest yourself!

Further reading:

Wikipedia Page about Língua dos Pês, with various dialects (includes links to other similar dialects in other languages)

The Brazilian equivalent if you’re interested is called Língua do P.

 

*=this is a line from a poem by José Jorge Letria. I heard it on a podcast and didn’t understand the whole thing but picked out “A poem born of an impulse, of a fever… of the sonorous temptation of a metaphor” early on. Ooh yeah, more of that please!

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A Standing Start

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I’m pretty good at Portuguese. I mean, I’m not a great linguist like Nigel Farage with his wine list, but I’m OK on a good day. So why is it that I still can’t seem to just start a conversation from scratch? I met a Portuguese lady the other day near my house and decided to do what all the famous internet polyglots do and start talking to her, but I hadn’t warmed up by thinking in Portuguese beforehand so, translated into english, the exchange went like this:

ARE YOU PORTUGUESE?

GOOD MORNING*!

I CALL MYSELF COLIN

I AM FROM OVER THERE!

…

…

…

BYE

There was some nervous laughter in between and she tried to look sympathetic to my attempts but it was basically just me broadcasting my own hopelessness. This is a pretty good example of how it’s always a good idea to do some practice to get your brain in gear before having a conversation. This is doubly true if you have an exam: never go in cold. It’ll be much harder.

 

*=It was 8.30PM

 

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Music and Toilets

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Listening today:

Ana Moura, because she’s coming to the Barbican Centre in September and I’m going with Mrs Lusk. I think a Ana’s possibly a bit uncool, like a Portuguese Mariah Carey, but I’m not bothered and I’m calling it homework

Luisa Sobral, because she seems like fun. I think she does songs in English as well as Portuguese, and for children as well as adults. I would dearly love to know what this is about, for example. Is it educational in some way? Just a fun thing to sing? What? I actually have a podcast of her talking about it so I’ll try and decipher that rather than take the coward’s way out and ask Mrs L.

Beatriz Gosta, because I was told it would be good to mix it up a bit with the podcasts. I listen to a lot of news and serious programming from Antena 1, but of course it’s all in one tone of voice and a narrow vocabulary, so I tried Antena 3 which is a hotbed of filth and depravity and shrieking yoof presenters. Well, it’s broadened my vocabulary, even if none of the words are usable in most conversations I’m likely to have in the queue to see Ana Moura.

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Key Learnings 4 – Um Falso Amigo

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Today’s lesson included the word “admirar” in an article about all the different types of coffee on offer in Portugal. I can’t remember the exact wording but it was something like

Não admira que as turistas preciso de um dicionário quando pedem um café!

The meaning seems to be “I’m not surprised the tourists need a dictionary when they order a coffee”. So “admirar”, which is obviously cognate with “admire” has obviously diverged in meaning somewhat from its English cousin.

In the same lesson, we also came across “vasculhar” which looks like it has something to do with “vascular” but if you’re expecting it to mean “to pump blood” or something then you’ve been had by another false friend. It actually means to search – not specifically searching for something but having a good old look round in general, in the way a thief might if he got into your house and was looking around to see what there might be to steal. A related word is “remexer” which means “rummage”.

Finally, “Rever” which is obviously cognate with “review” means “look again at”. It must be related to “revista” but “revista seems only to mean “magazine” now and has lost its connection tio what we think of as a review as in a book review – they use “comentário” instead.

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The Olympic Language Challenge – Sit Rep!

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I decided – for some reason – to just do the last part of the challenge and sign up for lessons in other languages. I have Arabic and BSL on my radar for after Portuguese so I booked a trial lesson in each, and my daughter said she wanted to learn Japanese, so I used my credits to book her a lesson on condition that she finds out how to shout “Row faster!” at my rowing partner, who is Japanese. I have deliberately avoided European languages that are too similar to Portuguese and might confuse me even more.

The main body of the challenge is going pretty well and I have been making some good progress on subjunctives. Today, I watched the movie “Os Imortais” which is a really excellent film, did some reading and listened to some of the new Practice Portuguese episodes aimed at new learners. It’s mostly pretty easy but they spend time explaining the finer points of common words like “pois” and the difference between trazer and levar, so I’m learning new things anyway.

Posted in English

Trying to Subscribe

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Trying to book an exam through the CAPLE site is proving tricky. Their website shows some exams happening in November but if I try to book one it tells me it’s full. It isn’t full though, they just haven’t added the slots onto the site and won’t until later in the year, I’m told. I find this problematic because I want it to be done and mentally crossed off my list but I just have to live with

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Mind Mapping

Posted on by Colin Lusk
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I decided to try my hand at mind-mapping to set out all the situations in which I might need to use the subjunctive tenses. In case you don’t know, these are three tenses that are used in situations where there’s some sort of doubt, intention, or future eventuality implied. Usually, they are not the main verb in a sentence, just part of a supporting phrase. They’re actually pretty easy to conjugate. The difficulty for us English speakers is recognising the situation in which they are needed, and remembering to pull one out of the bag in place of the standard indicative. That’s because we hardly use them at all in English. Basically the only time they would rear their head is in a phrase like “If I were a rich man”. So, in the song:

If I were a rich man,
Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dum,
All day long I’d biddy-biddy-bum.

“Were” is a subjunctive (imperfect subjunctive, I think) because it’s describing a hypothetical situation (being a rich man), which is why we’re using “were” instead of “was”. When it comes to translating, I think the verb we want here is “Ser” because although rich people can become poor, it feels more like a statement about a permanent state of affairs. I don’t think he wants to be rich for just one day. So we would translate this as “fosse” (first person imperfect subjunctive of “ser”)

“I’d” – short for “I would” of course – indicates we’re dealing with the conditional, which is a normal indicative tense, because it’s leading into the main thrust in the sentence: what he would do in that hypothetical situation. It’s a little difficult to translate because I don’t know the Portuguese verb for “to biddy-biddy-bum” but let me make an educated guess: bidibidibombiar, and you can make the first person conditional by just whacking an “-ia” on the end.

As for the daidles and deedles, well, I’ll have to leave those to someone with more expertise. Hey, my degrees are both in science, so what do I know about language? They’ll be adverbs, I expect. I never trusted adverbs.
Putting it all together then:

Se eu fosse um homem rico,
Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dum,
Todos os dias, eu bidibidibombiaria.

If you’re reading this and you’re not sure if you need to know about subjunctives, check with your teacher, but I believe they only really come into play at DIPLE/B2 level. It’s worth looking at them earlier, if only because they come up in books quite often and it’s useful to be able to recognise them, but I don’t think you would need to worry about them at B1 level… I didn’t anyway!

Anyway, if you’re interested, I’ve saved a pdf of the work in progress here. So far it only has the presente do conjuntivo (present subjunctive) but when it’s finished it’ll have the other two subjunctives – imperfeito (imperfect) and futuro (future)

Anyway, if you’re interested, I’ve saved a pdf of the work in progress here. So far it only has the presente do conjuntivo (present subjunctive) but when it’s finished it’ll have the other two subjunctives – imperfeito (imperfect) and futuro (future)

Anyway, if you’re interested, I’ve saved a pdf of the diagram here.

Posted in English

July Book Haul 

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I mostly study Portuguese as an excuse to buy more books. This week it’s “O Principezinho” (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and “Português Atual“, which has all the grammar I need for the B2 exam. I already have a book of Modelos (mock exam papers) but this will be a good way of getting on top of the grammar in the next couple of months.

Posted in English

The Olympic Language Challenge

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I signed up for iTalki’s Olympic Language Challenge. I’m doing OK. I’ve already hit “Power-Lifting” (3 hours of teaching in a day) and when I have finished my current booked lessons that will get me javelin (5 consecutive days). Then all I need is to do another 5 hours in July to hit marathon (20 hours total in the period). I quite fancied doing the fourth activity, Archery, which would mean taking a lesson each in three other languages, which I think would be a good laugh but I wanted to do at least one of them with my daughter and she wasn’t up for it. I haven’t completely given up though. I need to think about how to make it fun and also let her choose a teacher. iTalki lets you see the person in a video first so you can make sure they aren’t scarily strict. That’s reassuring.

Mini-challenges like this are a pretty good way of motivating yourself if you need a kick-start, and I definitely did. I question their value as a long-term way of keeping motivation alive though, because they encourage a stop-start attitude, where you reach the end of the time and decide to just not bother any more.  It’s already underway, but if you fancy signing up a little late you can have a look here.