OK definitely in a learning slump. No energy to do anything. No energy to post here, listen to anything, even read my book. I’m just a big monolingual potato at the moment. I need to snap out of it.
Slump
Category: English
A fellow learner, Frollein_d, put me onto this game, Quina, which is like a harder version of Termo. To be honest, it’s a little too hard for me. I can do it, but it makes my eyes bubble. It’s definitely worth a look though, if you’re a hardcore puzzle fan.
Comemos Bem
Will I ever be good enough at listening to understand this sort of thing without the subtitles. Even with the subtitles it’s bad enough.
Robert Palmer Tinha Razão
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Bater
I saw a bad translation in a vocabulary app: embater =to hit. Well, why is it not just bater? Bater seems to be one of those words that has been used as a rooot to make other verbs, and embater can mean hit if you want to say something like “The car hit a tree”, but it’s more like a collision than a punch. The way it works is…
Bater = To Strike, Beat, Hit. The vanilla version. How you translate it depends on the pronoun, to a certain extent.
Embater = Collide, crash
Abater = Slaughter, cull
Combater = Combat, counteract
There’s also esbater (to blur) and debater (to debate) but I don’t think those are part of the same family since they aren’t as violent.
I seem to write a lot about Bater. I wrote a whole post on it a while ago and… Have I posted this meme already? I feel like I must have. It’s pretty old and there are loads of copies so I don’t know who to attribute it to.
LOL – hooked a new follower with that last post!
My Foolproof Plan to Burn Fat and Build Lean Muscle
I’ve been noticing in the last few days I keep getting “likes” in old posts, and always the most boring, obscure homeworky ones too, not the fun ones. Of course I should have guessed, they’re all the ones with “exercise” in the name and some people are using bots to publicise their health-related blogs by dropping random likes on any post with a relevant keyword in the name. The Internet is a pointless place sometimes.
It’s Illegal, But You Can Do It
Discussing yesterday’s post with a friend, she pointed me to a sketch from a satirical show called Gato Fedorento (literally “Stinky Cat”) from 2007 which had a similar phrase in it. It’s actually not the same as the usage I’d heard, but it lives on as a meme, so I am definitely interested, and I spent some time understanding it anyway! The phrase is “É proibido mas pode-se fazer”.
The background is that in that year there was a referendum about reforming the abortion laws, which was quite a big deal in a largely catholic country. Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa had initially supported a referendum in 1997 but when it had finally come to the crunch ten years later he campaigned against it and set up a website critical of the plan called “Assim Não” (“Not like this”). Cynical political move or principled stand? Well, if I understand it, his reasoning was that in the ten years that had elapsed, he was out of power the Partido Socialista had launched the referendum, backed by a law they had written. The wording on the referendum remained “despenalização” (decriminalisation) but the law they were intending to pass was actually advocating “liberalização” (liberalisation), which he argued was slightly different. On top of that, there was an indication that women would be able to have abortions by their own choice, with no need to justify it on psychological, medical or other grounds, which he did not support. And he even goes on to paint a picture of a world where women are choosing abortions more-or-less at a whim. He is pretty ridiculous about it, actually. The bottom line was that he didn’t want to liberalise the conditions under which women could get abortions, he just wanted to take away the criminal penalty.
Here’s the original video.
(By the way, what’s the camera guy playing at? There are some really odd zoom shots and then, at about 2:00, he starts filming the guy through a glass on the table. That’s a pretty cool shot if you’re making an edgy police drama, but it’s weird AF in this context)
Anyway Gato Fedorento mocked him by having Ricardo Araújo Pereira repeat his speech (without the avant garde camera work) but spelling out the absurdity of how he wants it to work: “É proibido, mas pode-se fazer”. Or “It’s illegal but you can do it”.
Marcelo is the president now. Make of that what you will.
And I’m Not Your Brah
Quite enjoying a little nugget of dialogue I saw yesterday:
Posso means “may I?” and you probably know it’s used like “excuse me”, just as it is in English. If you need to squeeze past someone in a crowded space, you can say “posso” – may I? But since it is basically a question, the person you say it too might answer with the same verb in the second person and build it out a bit: “podes mas não deves”. You may, but you shouldn’t. It’s a kind of banterish way of replying if you are a banterish kind of person. Not quite as aggressive as this scene, which is the closest thing I can think of in English.
Happy Birthday Practice Portuguese
Apparently these lads have been at it for a decade now. I remember some of their earliest work and they’ve come a long way since. We in the language learning community salute you, sirs!
Luso 