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 