Category: English

Posted in English

Easy as ABC

Posted on by Colin Lusk

False friends are always fun to deal with, and I saw a pretty good example today in a social media post by a Brazilian who was trying to translate “Fui alfabetizado nos Estados Unidos” into English. Obviously as an English speaker, you automatically try and englishify it as “I was alphabetised in the United States”, imagining João arriving at the airport and being placed in an ordered list between Joana and Joaquim.

It’s a lovely image but no, it’s not that, obviously. Alfabetizar means to teach literacy – so he was taught to read and write in the United States. It’s not a very common word, but you’ll see a related adjective – analfabeto (illiterate) – quite often when people are criticising each other’s poor grammar online so hopefully it won’t be that hard to remember.

And are you ready for the word to use when you need to put your words in alphabetical order? It’s “alfabetar” without the iz. So not that different, but you probably want to keep them straight in your head or you’ll get funny looks when you explain to someone that you have been procrastinating from study by teaching your CDs to read. In fact, if they’re under 25 you night have to explain to them what a CD is first.

Posted in English

Desenrascar

Posted on by Colin Lusk

So I decided to dig into this word, desenrascar, found in the book I’m reading. Desenrascar means untangle, and desenroscar is more like uncoil, whereas and you can get the meanings of rasca and rosca respectively from the verbs. Desenrascar also seems to mean to sort something out in general resolve a problem.

Trying to understand this, I came across a site in which someone said this was the best English explanation of “o nosso povo (…) ao mesmo tempo desenrascado e forreta”

I tend to steer clear of the portuguese kids, partly because they don’t sing in portuguese but mostly because Americans can sometimes be a bit cringe when they’re too attached to the old country. Witness how chicagoans die their river green for St Patrick’s day, for example.

But anyway, there you go. They are big on doing stuff for themselves and desenrascar seems to be a key word there.

Incidentally, the only other time I’ve seen that word Berbicacho is in the title of a Deolinda song, which I mentioned a couple of years ago in a post about Viriatus.

Posted in English

Cats vs Dogs

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Spotted on twitter and laughed my head off.

I think it’s Brazilian, by the way. Not that different though. I think in european portuguese they would have dropped the “eu” in the first cat dialogue and used cão in place of cachorro. Obviously the punctuation is all over the place but that’s memes for you!

Posted in English

Desafogadamente

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I came across this word today and was strangely pleased by it. The root of it is the verb “afogar” whose main meanings are “to drown” or “to submerge”, but which has some related meanings which go along the lines of “to impede” or “to choke”, both of which make sense: you can imagine how being impeded or stifled might feel, figuratively, like being immersed in water, of how being choked or strangled would deprive you of breath just as surely as being drowned would.

So building on “afogar”, or rather its past participal “afogado” we’ve got the prefix “des” making it negative and the suffix “mente” making it an adverb, and we end up with “desafogadamente”, which you could literally render as “undrownedly”, but seems to be used to mean something like “freely” or “without hindrance”. Excellent stuff! Definitely using that at the next chance I get!

Affogato
Affogato (image courtesy of Leva Kisunaite)

Afogar is quite an easy verb to remember if you’re a fan of delicious Italian treats because you’ve probably come across an affogato. If you don’t know it, it’s a dessert consisting of a scoop of vanilla ice cream with coffee poured over it. This combination of cold and creamy with hot and bitter is literally “affogato al café” or “drowned in coffee” and it’s the same word, just italianified.

Posted in English

Typo… Or is it?

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I couldn’t work out what this word was doing here. Reduto is like redoubt, so it’s a kind of fortress… So what’s it doing in this sentence? I didn’t know so I asked.

He’s saying that, despite their natural conservatism, portuguese people have a redoubt – an unvanquished corner of their heart – where they nurture a longing for something else out there.

OK, makes sense. I thought I’d found a typo but instead I found some new vocabulary.

Posted in English

Typos

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Typos tend to be annoying at the best of times, but they can be super-confusing when they come up in portuguese texts because you don’t know if they are real typos or if it’s just some aspect of the language that you’re not familiar with. I was pretty sure about this one but had to go and ask. It is one of course. The fact that the stray “seu” is right next to the right word, “sei”, makes it obvious how it happened.

Posted in English

Updates – Portuguese Graphic Novels and Audiobooks

Posted on by Colin Lusk
The Walking Dead Part 6 Esta Triste Vida - Kirkman

I’ve just updated the Graphic Novel and Audiobook Lists with new discoveries in the last few months.

There are only a couple of new additions in the Audiobook page, mainly some new José Milhazes books on Kobo. I’ve read quite a lot of new Bandas Desenhadas though, so the graphic novels page has got about 50% longer, including “Finalmente o Verao”, which I finished today and will probably be reviewing tomorrow, plus a few others I read and reviewed earlier in the year, like Pardalita, Amor de Perdição and Quarentugas.

Remember, the list is sorted in order of how much I like them so you can ave time by starting at the top and stopping when you have reached your threshold if things that don’t seem worth bothering with.

If you’re new to the site, I have five lists: aside from these two, there are some lists with online learning resources, textbooks and language hacks, all of which get updated from time to time. You can access from the menu on the right there (or the bottom if you’re looking at this on a smartphone) but I’ll pin this post for a while to make them easier to find.

Posted in English

Termo-nator 2 (and 4!)

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I’ve mentioned Termo on here before. I like word games and doing a portuguese version just seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. But I didn’t realise that there were other versions of it on the same site: you can play Dueto and Quarteto.

This is really exciting. My breakfast brain teaser just got ten times harder!