Only two days till the exam and I have to admit I am not at all confident. I feel like knowledge is leaking from my head and my fluency level is declining sharply. In lessons I trip over my tongue, grope for easy words, lapse into English at the first sign of trouble. It’s a bloodbath. And yet my written Portuguese is OK. I really need to do something radical in the next two days. I’m thinking of taking the Wednesday off, painting the Portuguese flag on my chest and walking around the house naked reciting Os Lusíadas.
Time is ticking down to the B2 exam in T minus 4 days but I fancied a break from full-on learning so here’s a translation of another song by my favourite Portuguese band, Deolinda. I was really chuffed, on listening to it the other day, to realise it has an expressão idiomática in it that I recognise from the Practice Portuguese Podcast (in this episode). The phrase is “o que tem de ser tem muita força” (marked with *** below) and it means “What has to be has a lot of force”, or more colloquially “You gotta do what you gotta do”.
It also has some fun grammar in it including the contrast between “haver de” (means “to have to” but in a vague, non-specific way as in “you have to come and visit sometime” or “I really have to fix that broken clock” and “ter de” which is much more specific, signifying inevitability or obligation: “I have to do my homework” or “You have to put clothes on, sir, you can’t come to church naked”.
There are some good subjunctives to, most obviously in the title – “Seja Agora” being expression of hope – something like “let it be now”.
Nós havemos de nos ver os dois We have to see each other
ver no que isto dá to see what happens
ficar um pouco mais a conversar stay a while and talk
Ter a eternidade para nós We have eternity to ourselves
Quem sabe, jantar Who knows, maybe have dinner…
Se quiseres pode ser hoje If you want, it could be today.
Tem de acontecer, porque tem de ser It has to happen because it has to be
e o que tem de ser tem muita força*** and what has to be has a lot of force
E sei que vai ser, porque tem de ser And I know it’s going to happen because it has to be
Se é pra acontecer, pois que seja agora And if it’s going to happen, let it be now!
Nós havemos ambos de encontrar We both need to find
um destino qualquer some kind of destiny
ou um banquinho bom para sentar or a little bench to sit on
Vai ser tão bonito descobrir It’s going to be so beautiful to discover
que no futuro só that in future the only thing
quem decide é a vontade that will decide is our own will
Tem de acontecer, porque tem de ser It has to happen because it has to be
e o que tem de ser tem muita força*** and what has to be has a lot of force
E sei que vai ser, porque tem de ser And I know it’s going to happen because it has to be
Se é pra acontecer, pois que seja agora And if it’s going to happen, let it be now!
x2
Que seja agora Let it happen now
Que seja agora Let it happen now
Se é pra acontecer If it’s going to happen
Pois que seja agora Well, let it happen now
I’ve recently been using Linguee. It’s pretty good. I never really saw the point until recently when I had a couple fo duff translations from Google translate. Linguee puts the words into context so you can see how real human translators have translated them as part of wider sentences. It’s excellent although you do need to be a bit sneaky to know how to ask it the right questions.
Full disclosure:I got a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This is that review.
Guides to how to acquire languages seem to be quite in vogue at the moment, and I daresay if you’ve read one you’ll probably not want to spend time reading another. I must admit to only having filleted this one for tips rather than read it cover to cover. It’s short and dense with information so that wasn’t hard. Like most books of its type it starts by reassuring you that learning a language – while it takes time and effort – is not out of the reach of the average mortal; that nobody is “bad” at languages (although we all have days where we bloody well feel like it!) and that acquiring one doesn’t necessarily mean going back to reciting verb tables by rote. All standard stuff.
So why pick it over – say – Benny Lewis’s book, or Gabriel Wyner’s or… (insert polyglot guru of choice)? I think a large part of your reason for choosing a text is likely to be governed by the personality of the writer and whether you feel like you can spend a few hours in their company. Some are blokish, some self-absorbed, some cerebral. This one seems to be very practical in its focus and aimed at conveying tips rather than bigging up the author. Obviously she tells her own story at the start (a vital part of the formula of a polyglot book: I’m an ordinary person like you) but I didn’t get the sense of this being a vanity project or anything – she just gets on with it.
OK, so to come back to those practical examples I mentioned: there are a lot of pictures in the book showing lists and diagrams. This is really useful if you want to be able to bootstrap your way into a language without having to make it all up yourself or jumping in at the deep end with a language exchange on day 1. Many polyglot guides will be careful to avoid references to specific languages as a way of showing how universally-applicable the ideas are, but I think most newbies will appreciate something more concrete. This book has that in spades. I guess the only drawback is that the examples, of necessity, are of a specific language. If you happen to be studying one of the languages chosen (Korean, Spanish and French all feature heavily) that’ll be a blessing but I can imagine if not you might feel they weren’t speaking to you in quite the same way. At the end, there are tons of links and books mentioned but again only for specific languages. One of those languages is “Brazilian Portuguese”. Boo hiss.
So, getting right down to it, this is a good, practical guide for the new learner, more user-friendly than most, not flashy, and maybe not as “windswept and interesting” as some of the more fashionable ones either but well worth a look if you just want to get started quickly and with as little fuss as possible.
I haven’t been as careful as I should be lately about giving credit for the corrections on my Portuguese texts. I get a few corrections on each notebook entry on iTalki but the person doing most of the work on providing actual, proper Portuguese grammar to counteract all the Brazilian opinions is still professional Portuguese teacher Sophia who I pay for an hour of text-corrections per week. She has her blog here and he iTalki profile here if you would like to ask her to do the same for you.
Thanks Sophia for all your hard work. I’ll get the hang of it one day.
….of translated lyrics, you could do a lot worse than have a listen to “Tu Gostavas de Mim” which is by Ana Moura and is sung in a duet with Miguel Araújo on his live album. Araújo is one of the singers in As Azeitonas who I mentioned in the last post and by the way, also the guy singing in “Bitter Portuguese Guy Sings” a few weeks back. I really like the simplicity and the dry humour of it. The whole live album is good, actually.
I couldn’t find a translation of “Nos Desenhados Animados” (“in the Cartoons”) by As Azeitonas so I made one on LyricsTranslate. I like it. It’s soppy and nostalgic and has an overwrought widdly-widdly sax solo near the end but that doesn’t make me like it less.
In the Cartoons
I want to be lucky like a cartoon
in the morning on RTP1
You’re my Tom Sawyer
And my Huckleberry Finn
And you come in a mask and a cape
Up there, there are planets without end
You are my super-hero
Without a cowboy hat
With a galleon and a bottle of rum
I was yours and nothing more
One for all and all for one
In the cartoons
I already know the end
The good pioneer
The swordsmen seizing power
and Prince Charming
Always returns to me
I am Jane and you Tarzan
The Juliet of my Dartagnan
If your horse fails you
I have so much to tell
Of the ghost beneath my sheets
Of the treasures we hide from the Spaniards
In the cartoons
I already know the end
The good pioneer
The swordsmen seizing power
and Prince Charming
Always returns to me
When the ending comes
We can change the channel
In the cartoons
It rarely rains and never – almost never – ends badly
[By the power of Greyskull!]
We were up at the crack of dawn today to get home. I went all the way back with my knuckles clenched white as the plane juddered and shook and banked and the stewards disappeared behind a curtain and made noises like they were battling against a group of armed terrorists.
When I got home I found this bundle of goodies from iTalki waiting for me, as prizes for the Olympic challenge yonks ago. Now I’m just fondling my new books and going through the corrections from the texts I wrote while I was away. Ugh! No matter how many lessons I take, I never seem to learn.
Luso 