Following on from the last one…
“An optimist is a person who, if he falls off the top of a building would wave through every window and say “doing all right so far!”
This is a bit of a cheat since it’s just a straight translation of an english joke but I like how it sounds anyway.
Eastbourne doesn’t have much to recommend it but it has – or had when I lived there, anyway – an absolute jewel of a bookshop. It was a massive, sprawling affair with three floors and no recognisable system. Sometimes there was a parrot upstairs. And it was there that I first came across a book called “Portuguese Somersault” by Jan and Cora Gordon. I’d never heard of it before and I haven’t heard much of them since, either. To my surprise, though, they are still known today, and there’s a chap who has taken the time to curate a fan site, with biographical details and more about their various travel writings, which you can find at janandcoragordon.co.uk.
The book is actually two books, written in 1926 and 1933, detailing their travels in the country. They are reflective travellers who took the trouble to learn something of the language and to investigate their own preconceptions of the country. Along the way, they made sketches, and these are scattered throughout the chapters as illustrations. Here, for example, is a fish seller blowing into his fish to make them look bigger so he can get a better price. Cool eh?
I read it yonks ago and can’t actually remember a whole lot of it, to be honest. Maybe it’s due for a re-read. What I do know is that the “Somersault” of the title is a reference to the dramatic change in the country between the two visits. 1926 was the year of the coup that overthrew the Primeira República Portuguesa and established a dictatorship which, by 1933, when they returned, had become known as the Estado Novo (New State), led by António de Oliveira Salazar.
One small, dark detail stuck in my mind that gave me a little premonitory shudder: On page 75, they meet a Portuguese girl who had been separated from her parents during the Great War and left with relatives in Germany. Growing up, she believed herself to be German. When she was finally reunited with her parents, ten years later, she was pleased of course, but it came as a huge shock to her to find that she wasn’t a German at all. What a jolt that must have been to a girl who felt herself to have a “German Soul”. Now, at the age of seventeen, she would have less freedom than before. Worse, she would have to marry a Portuguese man who wouldn’t even understand her German love. Well, I think we can all see how this sort of cultural dislocation would be a shock to anyone. What I thought was telling, though, was when she describes her disappointment at finding out that she wasn’t who she thought she was:
“They want me to be a nice Portuguese girl but I can’t because, you see, I’ve been brought up as a German girl, and I was taught in the school that the Germans are the higher race, aren’t they? Do you see that?”
Jan and Cora note this as a minor personal tragedy but don’t comment on the idea that Germans are teaching children to feel themselves superior to everyone else. And this just ten years from German bombs falling on neighbouring Spain at the start of the Civil War, thirteen years from the start of the Second World War. The Salazar government was neutral in both, but gave military and logistical support to the Nationalist (and German) side in Spain and was broadly sympathetic to Hitler, only staying out of World War Two because of long-standing alliances with Britain.
Well, it’s easy for me, with the benefit of hindsight, to read more into this incident than the Gordons did. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that they should have seen the future in that one little tale, but I thought it was a fascinating little glimpse into what was happening under the surface of Europe in the inter-war years.
I’m up to five Memrise decks now. The latest is called the “Heated Debate Toolkit” which has a lot of good “joining” words and phrases useful for having a discussion with another person, introducing arguments, pointing out errors and that sort of thing. It borrows quite heavily from a list put together by… someone… Benny Lewis? I think so… But it has translations attached (because that’s how Memrise works), some new phrases have been added, some left out (mostly because they were too obvious or else too obscure) and I have amended a couple to make them more Portugal-friendly, because a lot of them were written with the grammar of a large country in South America which shall remain nameless.
The bundle of Portuguese swag I ordered on my birthday has arrived after only five days, which is a lot better than Amazon can manage these days. Nice work FNAC!
The Postman brought me…
Dias Passados – Walking Dead Vol 1. I’ve never read any of these or seen the series so I guess I might as well use “it’s homework” as an excuse to start.
Os Imortais [Amazon link
O Pátio das Cantigas by Leonel Vieira,which is a modern remake of an old classic. I probably should have bought the old classic, but I’m an idiot so I got this instead
Canção ao Lado and Outras Histórias by Deolinda [Amazon links here
It’s my birthday today. Actually, unless I can finish writing this in the next minute and a half it was yesterday. Anyway… In Portuguese you can say this in two ways:
“Hoje é o meu aniversário” just means “Today is my birthday”
“Hoje faço anos” literally means “Today I make years”. I love this! It’s like my life is a machine for making time.
By the way, the Portuguese words to happy birthday are:
Parabéns a você
Nesta data querida
Muitas felicidades
Muitos anos de vida
Hoje é dia de festa
Cantam as nossas almas
Para o(a) menino(a) [Insert Your Name Here]
Uma salva de palmas
I can remember the first verse, but the second… never.
I ordered a big bag of Portuguese swag from Fnac.pt and I’ll blog about that when it arrives.
I mentioned a while ago that Rui and Joel’s European Portuguese podcast, Practice Portuguese was still a thing and that I was going to sign up for a paid subscription. Well, I’ve been finding it very helpful. I already had all the podcasts on my ipod, of course, but I find it hard, sometimes, to follow everything that’s being said. Being a pro member gives you access to subtitled video versions, with a complete transcription, key vocabulary, and a quiz at the end. Well, there’s a section on the DEPLE exam that involves listening and answering questions, and I’m nervous about it, so this is enormously helpful for me, and I am working my way through them. Once you’ve looked at the video features for an episode, listening again to the audio is a lot clearer and I find my level of understanding goes up a notch the next time I listen to it on the iPod at the gym or while wrestling a filha’s stick insects.
You can try out the subscription service by going to the subs page on their site and scrolling down. No, further than that.Ignore the video of Rui talking to his Avó. Go about half way down. The video is called Diálogo 10 – Encomendar uma Pizza. That. Try that.
I eavesdropped on a webinar by Lindsay Dow and Shannon Kennedy in which they talk about how to start speaking and producing language when you aren’t ready to actually go head-to-head with another human yet. It’s something I’ve written about in an earlier post, because there is so much emphasis on speaking straight away in a lot of the language learning advice out there, so it was reassuring that two badass polyglots had dealt with the same issue too. They give some useful tricks for coaxing language out of yourself and developing some confidence.
The seminar is here for now but sadly it won’t be up for very long. Hi ho. You might be interested enough to follow up Shannon’s course on the subject, which is called “Say Goodbye to Shy“
I had this idea for a joke in Portuguese yesterday while I was studying and I decided to turn it into a tweet. The verdict seems to be that it’s a bit crap.
One guy on iTalki liked it when I put it up for corrections but everyone else said “I can see what you’re driving at but I didn’t actually laugh”. And it got zero retweets on Twitter.
The english translation, though, got 54 (and counting!)
…which is more than any other tweet I’ve ever done with the exception of a photograph of a train cake I made for my daughter’s birthday party that was so bloody awful that it briefly catapulted me to Twitter-fame. I’m not really sure what this means. I mused on iTalki…
Fiz uma “tweet” com a piada em português e então fiz um outro com uma tradução em inglês (a piada corre bastante bem em inglês também: “Arctic”/”Article”). O tweet inglês retweetou-se cinquenta-e-dois vezes, e o português… nada! Talvez este facto mostra que a piada não é engraçada em português, mas provavelmente somente mostra que a maioria dos meus seguidores não falam português!
…but I wonder is it purely because so few lusophones saw it or is there something specific about the humour that gets lost in translation?
Obviously, some things are never going to translate because the humour hinges on a pun that wouldn’t exist in the other language. Like these:
p: qual é o animal que tem mais que três olhos e menos que quatro? r: piolho
p: qual é o instrumento musical que tem mais que três e menos que quatro anos? r: piano
These jokes only work because the portuguese words pi+olho=piolho (π+eye=louse) and pi+ano=piano (π+year=piano). That’s a total dead-loss if you wanted to translate it.
In other cases, joke formats are specific to a time and place. The Portuguese don’t have lightbulb jokes, for example, so when I sent this to my teacher, she didn’t recognise it as a part of a wider tradition.
Quantos Brasileiros precise para mudar uma lâmpada? Nenhum. Lâmpada não mudou por causa do acordo ortográfico
To be honest, I think I’m a long way from understanding whether there is some impassable barrier to fully understanding what tickles another nation. I’d love to find out though!
In the meantime, jokes and puns are a great way of brushing up your language skills and helping you remember stuff in a way that isn’t boring. Along the way, you get an insight into what makes people laugh in other countries. Here’s a guy getting his head around an old joke in English, for example. I happened to see it on iTalki today. They can be bilingual or just in the target language.
One of the simplest examples of puns as language-learning tools would be a mnemonic. Maybe you didn’t even realise that’s what you were doing when you came up with a mnemonic, but it’s all about the word play, baby, whether it’s acrostics, poems or puns. For example
You use a puxador when you want to push a door open
A puxador is a door handle and it is pronounced “pushadoor”. This is great until you find out that “puxar” actually means “pull”, not “push”. Push is “empurrar”, but even as you’re telling other people about this annoying fact, and tweeting “FML” about it, you are actually embedding all three new words in your mind in a single bad-luck anecdote, so it actually works better for being misleading.
One of my favourite apps, Memrise, encourages users to make “mems” – pictorial mnemonics – to help each other remember words. I have only done one because although I have ideas, who has that kind of time?
Here…
*points right*
…is my Mem for “As Cuecas”
Another favourite joke format is the Lost Consonant. This is a format developed by Graham Rawle of the Guardian, back in the late eighties. He used to write a sentence that had one consonant omitted from one word, totally changing the meaning of the sentence. What I like about these is the challenge of making the grammar of the sentence work properly with or without the missing letter. That makes it a fun challenge for a person learning to write sentences in other languages, and to be honest, I suspect that I haven’t got it right every time when I have tried it. For example
which means
Increase the battery life of your mobile phone by not washing it in bleach
with the added c in “bateria” you get
Increase the life of the bacteria on your mobile phone by not washing it in bleach
But does the grammar actually make sense in either or both of these sentences? Christ knows, and I can’t even think how I would explain all this to a Portuguese person so they could judge. They’d think I was off my head.
There are some examples of original Graham Rawle Lost Consonants here.
Twitter Lost Consonants in English (#lostconsonants)
Twitter Lost Consonants in Portuguese (#consoantesperdidos)
I have already banged on at length about Astérix cartoons as the gateway to better vocabulary, but there are plenty of cartoons out there on the web if you know where to look and they can be quite instructive. Like this for example:
It works because “nada” means “nothing” but it’s also the second person singular imperative form of the Portuguese verb “nadar” – so it means, “hey, person I know reasonably well – you need to swim now!” And there’s no better way of remembering that fact than by laughing at this joke!
I found a new comic I like called Zorg & Borges recently. I think it’s on this page but the Publico website seems to be horrifically slow right now so apologies if this sends you to the wrong place. There’s a single example of it on here for sure though!
It’s quite rare that I actually understand tweets in Portuguese. Something about the condensed format, I suppose. I enjoyed these ones though.
This rare example of Cristiano Ronaldo posting something on Twitter that isn’t product placement is a really nice one minute of football (about as much football as I can stand tbh) and some good listening practice into the bargain. As a bonus, he is from Madeira so he even has the same accent as a minha esposa.
Luso 