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
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:
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”
I think this might be my favourite example of weird english slang being absorbed into portuguese. So far I have only come across brazilian examples, but like the US and UK, these things have a way of making their way across the atlantic. For those of you who don’t have kids of a certain age, “shipping” is when you speculate/imagine/fantasise about two people, real or imaginary, who are, or should be in a relationSHIP. From what I can tell, tween girls seem to do it a lot with males: fictional characters, pop stars, or whoever. I’m not sure why their being gay should be so exciting, but who can understand anything when it comes to tweenagers? Often there’s a ship name like Rydon (Brendon Urie and Ryan Ross) or Klance (Keith and Lance from the series Voltron). It’s always kinda been around in celebrity gossip (Brangelina, for example) but seems to be a huge deal in fandoms, with people arguing over matches between diverse and unlikely characters.
I just love that it’s become a proper portuguese verb, although I’m a little sad to see it’s not on conjuga-me.net yet. Most new additions to the language from english end up being AR verbs because they’re more regular than ER or IR.
The video below contains (a) brazilian accent and (b) coraçõezinhos
So I’m trying to sort out some basic grammar that I probably should have worked out a long time ago. To do this, I’ve been working with a different teacher who lives in the UK, simply because I don’t have the skills to be able to even ask the question in Portuguese and I needed someone who would understand me asking in english
Today: What’s the difference between these ways of exressing possession.
A sua propriedade
Propriedade sua
A propriedade dele
It always seems a bit random and I’ve never quite been able to spot a pattern. The third one is the obvious odd one out because it’s the only one that makes it clear that it’s the property of “him”, whereas the others could all be him, her, them, or, if you’re being formal, the person you’re speaking to, so in a way that helps – you could use when you wanted to be very specific about who it belongs to. In practice, I’m told, it’s also used in less formal, spoken situations.
As for the first and second, the answer seems to be simpler than I thought though: it just depends whether you have a definite article in there. If it’s a specific thing: this is his property, it’s “a sua propriedade”, whereas the second quote, which comes from my review of the film Comboio de Sal e Açúcar is about the subject’s attitude: he treated the passengers as his property.
O livro é de um amigo meu [indefinite article: it belongs to a friend of mine]
O livro é do meu amigo [definite article: it belongs to my friend]
Now, here’s the shock though: I had been thinking of these words – seu, meu, minha, etc as possessive pronouns, but they’re not, they’re determinantes – more like adjectives, really: In “o meu amigo”, “amigo” is the noun and “meu” just determines whose friend he is. Meu can also be a possessive pronoun but only when it stands in for the noun.
“O Donald, as suas mãos são pequenas; as minhas são grandes”. In this sentence, “suas” is another determinant but “minhas” is a possessive pronoun because I’m using it instead of saying the whole noun again “as minhas maãos”. In english it’s doing the job of “mine” instead of just “my”. There are some other examples, explained in portuguese on Ciberdúvidas.
OK, simple, I can understand a couple of simple rules like that. I guess, though, it’s like most rules in english: you obey them only insofar as you can do so without writing something ugly. So I cam across a counter-example within about ten minutes of this conversation happening in the song “Saia Rodada” by Carminho. I’ve pasted the lyrics below and highlighted forms that match in green and the one that doesn’t in red.
Vesti a saia rodada
P’r’ apimentar a chegada
Do meu amor
No mural postei as bodas
Rezei nas capelas todas
Pelo meu amor
Vem lá de longe da cidade e tem
Os olhos rasos de saudade em mim
E eu mando-lhe beijos e recados em retratos meus
Pensa em casar no fim do verão que vem
Antes pudesse o verão não mais ter fim
Que eu estou tão nervosa com esta coisa do casar
Meu Deus
Vesti a saia rodada
P’r’ apimentar a chegada
Do meu amor
No mural postei as bodas
Rezei nas capelas todas
Pelo meu amor
Por tantas vezes pensei eu também
Sair daqui atrás dos braços seus
De cabeça ao vento e a duvidar o que faz ele por lá
I think all that’s happening here is that she’s stretched the normal rules to make the rhyme with “adeus” work in the next triplet. I’ve added it to my list of questions for next time.
Anyway, as a side note, I wondered what a “saia rodada” was anyway. A round skirt? I googled it and saw a load of pictures of… well… skirts. So I asked online and was told it would all make sense if I searched for videos of “saia rodada danca” but it didn’t work because there’s an insupportable brasilian rock band called saia rodada and this is the first video I got.
But then a portuguese guy mentioned that it was “folclorico” so I added that into my search and had more luck. Apparently it’s a long, swishy skirt that is used in a lot of dances because of the way it moves. Here are some people demonstrating. Tag yourself, I’m the guy in the grey trousers.
WHew! It’s been a long time since I wrote this much about grammar and general musings. Well, come for the determinantes possessivos, stay for the grupo folclórico.
It’s been a while since I posted any of those “Key Learnings” from lessons and I should probably do it more to give my crap memory a bit of a nudge to do its job. So here are couple of things I picked up from today’s Aula. They’re both really close near-cognates with subtly different meanings:
Consensual
This word looks like a straight-up cognate but it’s diverged slightly from the english meaning and stayed closer to “consensus” than “consent”.
É consensual no meio cientifica nao haver o direito de modificar o patrimonio hereditário da espécie humana.
…means something like “It’s agreed by everyone in the field of science that we don’t have the right to modify the human genetic heritage”
Presentear
This word obviously comes from the same root as the verb “to present” but it isn’t used in the positive sense – presenting people with gifts or medals, for example, only ironically in negative situations.
O objectivo é conseguir substâncias capazes de corrigir os efeitos com que a natureza vai presenteado os homens
…means something like “The objective is to find substances that can correct the symptoms with which nature has presented people”
I came across this abbreviation in Português Empresarial. Nobody seemed to know what it meant but a Brazilian named Cynthia solved the mystery. It stands for ” volume de negócios” -ie, a company’s turnover. I don’t know why the second V is there. Maybe the person who invented it had a stutter (“gagueira” if you want to know – or “gaguejar” in the verb form)
It’s been a while since I posted any of those “Key Learnings” from lessons and I should probably do it more to give my crap memory a bit of a nudge to do its job. So here are couple of things I picked up from today’s Aula. They’re both really close near-cognates with subtly different meanings:
