Category: English

Posted in English

Menos At Work

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I sometimes get confused between “pelo menos” and “ao menos” so here are some jottings about different expressions with preposition+menos. They can just occur randomly. For example “A simplificação traduzir-se-á, no entanto, por menos exigências administrativas” just means it’ll result in fewer administrative overheads, but this is about where they’re used together with more co-ordination. The bulk of it comes from Ciberdúvidas and from Gramática Aplicada Níveis B2, C1.

Pelo menos

Pelo menos means “at least” and can be used anywhere you’d use “at least” in english including seemingly idiomatic things like “At least tell me your name, even if you won’t tell me anything else”

Ao menos

Is essentially the same as pelo menios but with the important difference that you can’t use it for quantity – so if you’re saying “I need at least ten chickens” it’s “preciso de pelo menos dez frangos” and not “ao menos”.

A menos que

This means “unless” and since it introduces something that only might happen, it needs a subjunctive:

“Eu estarei lá a menos que chuva” (“I’ll be there unless it rains”)

Por menos …. que

There’s a set of phrases in Gramática Aplicada that correspond to english phrases like “No matter how much money you have, you can’t buy happines”. There aren’t any examples that use “menos” but on the same principle I assume you can do this sort of thing:

“Por menos roupas que eu use, estou sempre som suor” (“no matter how little I’m wearing, I’m always sweaty”)

Posted in English

Já & Ainda

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Jottings from Ciberdvidas, with some side-notes pulled from other places:

General Meanings of Ainda

Most simply, it’s just “still” e.g. “Ainda estás a adormecer?”

It can mean “one day” as in the example “Tu ainda hás-de ser muito feliz” (“you’ll be happy one day”)

It can be a reinforcer – like mesmo – but applied to a specific time as in the example “Ainda ontem o vi” (“I saw him only yesterday”)

It can work like “além disso” as in the example “Fui jantar. Comi muito bem e ainda me diverti com a conversa de Miguel” (but cf the note to this text where I used the phrase “ainda por cima” which has more of a sense that the thing being added to the situation is making ot even worse, rather than even better!)

It can mean “at least “Ainda se ele marcasse um golo, o dinheiro era bem gasto, mas assim…”

Interesting that you can imagine english sentences that would meet all these cases and would all use “still”, because it’s one of those words that can be used in places where it doesn’t have a real meaning but subtly tweaks the existing meaning of the sentence.

General Meanings of Já

Under normal circs, it means “already”, but like the use of that word in jewish slang, it can also mean “right now”. “Vou-me já embora” means “I’m going right now”

Já in questions/answers

If a question contains the word “já” and you want toanswer affirmatively you’d normally use “já”. Otherwise,”Ainda nao”

“Já comeste?” / “Já sim”

“Já leste o artigo?” / “Ainda não”

Ainda in questions/answers

Likewise, if the question contains ainda then the answer would normally contain ainda in the positive and já in the negative

“Ainda estudas português?” / “Sim, ainda estudo”

“Ainda estuda japonês?”/ “já não”

With “que”

“Ainda que” is “Although” and it’s followed by a subjunctive

“Ainda que eu esteja de regime, às vezes como gelado”

Já que is “since ” and doesn’t

“Não tenho tempo para estudar já que comecei o meu novo projecto”

Other Locutions

Ainda bem = “It’s just as well”

Ainda assim = “Even so”

Ainda mais = “Even more”

Desde já = “As of this moment”

Posted in English

Two Become One

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Here’s an interesting thing I noticed yesterday: it’s pretty commonplace in portuguese to use collective nouns like “a gente” and “a família” as purely singular and not really acknowledge that the unit is made up of several people. This happens in english too but the portuguese are more strict. For example, we’d usually say “my family is coming to dinner” but not “the people is angry” because people is plural, whereas gente isnt. Yesterday I came across this sentence

Tanto nós como o casal nosso amigo, não estamos interessados em viagens muitas horas”

The highlighted bit means “our friend the couple”. In other words, the married couples is treated as a unit to the extent that it is “our friend” rather than the two individuals being “our friends”.

Posted in English

More About Consulates

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I thought I’d add a quick blog post in english to follow up the text I’ve just written in portuguese, for the benefit of anyone who might be going to the portuguese consulate to conduct any sort of business, but especially for anyone who needs to register their marriage and change the name on their ID Card, maybe in preparation for applying for citizenship or applying for a passport. I guess in the age of Brexit there will be a lot of people having to brave the bureaucracy. Sigh.

portuguese-passport-big

First of all, you can only make bookings online on the consulate website and they come available at stupid o’clock at night, so you’ll need to plan this well in advance.

Second, the list of necessary documents the consulate supplies isn’t entirely complete, as I’ve mentioned in my test. For a start, if you’re like us, wanting to register a marriage, you’ll need your other half. In other words, a portuguese woman can’t go along, prove she is married and get her name change processed, she has to bring her estrangeiro husband along and have him sign some stuff at the same time. On top of that, the husband’s birth certificate and the marriage certificate both have to have been issued within the last 6 months. If you have the originals, sorry, but those won’t do, you have to have them reissued. You can do this online without too much effort and at a reasonable cost, and it only takes a few days to arrive, although if, like me, you need to ask for three extra copies because the appointment keeps being rescheduled, you might come under suspicion of identity fraud!

And third, prepare for a slightly tedious day. Although both parents need to be there, it’s best not to bring a child if you can avoid it. In our case, the funcionario got a bit arsey when our thirteen-year-old came, and there aren’t many children with the patience to stick it out for three or four hours in a mouldy building with an all-pervading air of bureaucratic intransigence. What I said in the text is not an exaggeration: we were talking to the manager of the office and staff did keep ambling in without knocking and asking her basically the same question. Their system was down and nobody quite knew what to do about it. They wanted to cancel our appointment and make us come back again but m’wife wasn’t going to put up with that nonsense. There really was a 2014 calendar on the wall and she actually discussed the cases & personal situations of 4 other cases just as chit-chat while we were sitting right in front of her. There were boxes everywhere and the general atmosphere was of complete chaos. It’s no wonder the consulate in London has such a terrible reputation among portuguese emigrants.

I’m not one of nature’s managers, but I could definitely imagine a few changes someone could make to make the whole thing easier for everyone. For a start, just fixing the website to show the correct details of what to bring would save hours a week dealing with wasted appointments of people who don’t have the right things with them. That would make life easier both for the staff and for the vistors. A few signposts, a bit of training in procedures, some customer focus, a few hours spent putting the boxes away in a cupboard… it honestly wouldn’t take much to turn things around and make it work better for everyone.

Posted in English

Cash

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Words and phrases related to money

Estar teso / Ficar liso = to be skint

Bagatela = a bargain

Puxar os cordões à bolsa = control spending [“pull the purse strings”]

Abrir os cordões à bolsa = foot the bill

Massa/nota/pastel/guito = money

Cheio de nota = loaded with cash

Pipa de massa = a moneybags

Caloteiro = deadbeat – someone who doesn’t pay what they owe

Ao preço de a chuva = very cheap [“at the price of rain”]

Custar os olhos na cara = cost an arm and a leg [“cost the eyes in your head”]

Levar fiado = buy on credit

 

 

 

Posted in English

Transatlantic Witterings

Posted on by Colin Lusk

images

I’m going to use this post as a notepad for brazilian language notes.

Abbreviations

I’ve been having skype language exchanges with a brazilian PE teacher who lives in Portugal, and that’s not too bad because he knows the euopean dialect, but I’ve also joined a sort of online gaming board made up of some brazilian dudes who talk in abbreviations, and that’s like being buffeted about inside a washing-machine full of abbreviations.

vdd=verdade
tva=estava
cmg=comigo
vlw=valeu (“thanks”)
ñ=não

One that flummoxed me was “blz” which, from the context I thought was a borrowed “please” (they use borrowed americanisms like “man” a lot so this is not as mad as it sounds) but it’s actually “beleza” which is a regional way of saying “ok” or “understand?” You reply with “beleza” if you get it and “não entendi” if not.

Galera

Galera seems to be used in more or less the same way as the portuguese “malta” in my group but I think it’s more like “team”

PQP

Means “Puta que pariu” literally ‘bitch that gave birth’ but less literally just a general all-purpose swear. Linguee translates it as “fucking hell”

Posted in English, Portuguese

Se, Se, Se What You Want, But Don’t Play Games With Conjugation

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I’ve been reading “Doze Segredos Da Língua Portuguesa” with a particular eye to reflexive verbs and verbs with impersonal pronouns, following on from discussions I’ve been having with a portuguese teacher resident in britain, about some of the more complicated aspects of the language that I’m not able adequately to describe to my usual portuguese teacher owing to my inability to express the question in portuguese! The specific point of grammar is the one described in a blog post a few months back.

Anyway, here are some examples that jumped out at me during chapter:

Diga-se o que se disser, a verdade é que os portugueses desprezam activamente tal parente, que, coitado, não merece tal sorte. [2x subjunctive tenses in the passove voices – bringing the grammatical thunder: means something like “whatever might be said, it’s true that the portuguese don’t really care about such a parent that hasn’t deserved such a fate”]

Ora a identidade vai alimentar-se daquilo que distingue os vários povos uns dos outros [True reflexive verb ir+inf: means something like “Now, identity will always feed on that which distinguishes groups of people from one another”]

Que se fale galego na Galiza e espanhol no mundo que isso do português não pode interessar a espanhol que se preze. [2x passive voice present subjunctive: means something like “because galician is spoken in galicia and spanish in the world, the question of portuguese isn’t interesting to a spanard who knows his own worth” but I’m not sure – in fact I’m not even sure I didn’t make a transcription error when I wrote it down!]

…o facto de o Brasil se ter mantido como território unido… [manter used reflexively: means something like “…the fact of brazil having stayed as a united territory…”]

Muitas pessoas que se divertem a apontar os erros dos outros estão a proteger uma ideia de pureza associada a ideia de língua nacional, que deve ser protegida como se dum cristal se tratasse. [two reflexive verbs – one presente indicative, the other imperfect subjunctive: Means something like “many people who amuse themselves pointing out other people’s errors are protecting a notion of purity linked to the idea of a national language which must be protected as if it were a crystal”]

Os exemplos acumulam-se [reflexive: means “the examples accumulate”]

Se olharmos para a lista das dez línguas de Portugal que acabámos de ver, apercebemo-nos de uma grande diferença entre as primeiras e as últimas. [aperceber-se is a reflexive verb that means “notice”so…: Means something like  “If we look at the list of the ten languages of Portugal, we notice a big difference between the first and last”]

 

Posted in English

Time for a Change of Strategy

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I’ve been having a bit of a rethink lately. I’m not making the progress I should, really. I did what I sometimes do: listened to some language-learning podcasts, namely The Fluent Show with Kerstin Cable.

I think the main things I need to do are:

  • Pay more attention to start times (I have drifted into a habit of starting late)
  • Warm up properly (starting a lesson directly from work or from some other aactivity is never healpful. My brain has to already be in Portuguese mode)
  • Ask my teacher to be more interrupty. In general, I don’t like to be interrupted too much because it disrupts my flow, but have a feeling I am maybe being allowed to develop bad habits as a result of saying so, and maybe
  • Get more structure – look at exercises in the lessons and follow them up between lessons instead of just pursuing a completely separate curriculum as soon as the call ends
Posted in English, Portuguese

Unexpected Prepositions

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Just straight doing my homework online now: this is about grammar and unexpected prepositions in sentences. For example

  • “O cheiro a gasolina” (literally “the smell at petrol”)
  • “Eu conheço apenas dois abrunheiros ao alcance dum homem de meia idade numa bicla” (“I know of only two blackthorn trees to the reach of a middle aged man on a bicycle”… which is a phrase most of us use every day)
  • “As mulheres que fizeram parte da luta para os direitos das mulheres votarem” (the women to took part of the struggle for women’s suffrage”)
  • “Viciado no Facebook” (“addicted in Facebook”)

I was hoping there’d be a way of thinking about prepositions, or the meaning of prepositions that would make it easier to select one if I came across a situation, in the wild, that seemed to need one. Currently what I do is translate in my head from an english phrase I want to say and choose the portuguese preposition that matches. So with the last one, for example, I would have said “Viciado ao Facebook”.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be an easy answer to this – you just have to learn the whole phrase – viciado em… and use it as much as possible to make that way of talking stick. Presumably, after a while, it gets easier…

Incidentally, sometimes different prepositions can be used in different contexts. For example, O Cheiro a gasolina” is the smell of gasoline in the abstract, whereas if you are being more specific it would be “o cheiro de gasolina” and if you were talking about an actual puddle of it you’d use “da”. In Hugo Lourenço’s book Ruínas he writes of his memory of car journeys with his family: “E poucos segundos depois o cheiro a gasolina infiltrava-se as narinas e eu inspirava-o com prazer. Sempre gostei do cheiro da gasolina, hoje não é diferente”. I think in the first instance he’s talking about a gasoliney smell and in the other he’s talking about times when he has smelled actual gasoline.

Petrol. I mean Petrol.

I don’t think it’s very clear-cut though. For example, I’ve seen two versions of a well-known quote from Apocalypse Now, which gives me an excuse to photoshop it twice:

primary__20_20_20_20_20apoc-thumb-400x211-30117

So I think that’s “I love a Napalmy smell in the morning” on the left and “I love smelling whatever Napalm happens to have been dropped on the village in the morning” on the right.

Anyroadup, I’m meant to do three examples of each so here goes. I’ll count the photoshop as one.

O cheiro a…

  • O cheiro a lavanda lembra-me da minha avó.
  • Lembro-me do verão de 1976: o calor, os dias compridos e o cheiro a relva cortada no ar.

O cheiro de…

  • Abri o guarda-roupa e o meu nariz foi assaltado pelo cheiro de lavanda.
  • Nunca mais voltarei para o restaurante: a comida foi mal cozinhada e o cheiro de suor do empregado era nojento!

Ao alcance

  • O preço destes moveis está ao alcance de alguém, de qualquer nível de rendimento.
  • Amarrei o cão a uma árvore e deixei uma tigela de água ao alcance da corda.
  • O golo dos espanhóis encontrou-se ao alcance do pé de Ronaldo mais uma vez

Fazer parte de

  • Quando era jovem, fiz parte duma peça de teatro.
  • O governo de Trump não faz parte da aliança das nações do oeste tal como na época do presidente Obama, ou os seus antecedentes.
  • Quero fazer parte duma corrida de dez quilómetros no final do verão.

Viciado em

  • Durante a minha adolescência, fiquei viciado em cafeína.
  • O sistema económicas do mundo está viciado em óleo cru.
  • A minha filha está viciada em shippar personagens de mangá

Update – a couple of days later

O cheiro a…

  • Durante os anos, a escola ficou permeada pelo cheiro a couve.

O cheiro de…

  • O cheiro de couve informou-me que o jantar estava quase pronto.

Ao alcance

  • Se trabalharmos juntos, um aumento de desempenho de 50 por cento está ao nosso alcance.

Fazer parte de

  • Se quiseres fazer parte da peça de teatro, é preciso ensaiar muito connosco

Viciado em

  • Durante os anos oitenta, a minha avó ficou viciada na série “Dallas”