Well, our passports arrived and now I have no excuse to not go to Portugal*. I have mixed feelings about this though. As I explained, tremulously, during the produção oral of the B1 exam, “tenho medo de voar” – I am scared of flying – and it’s pretty hard to get there by canoe, so I will just have to wash down a couple of diazepam with a generous bottle or two of scotch and hope to wake up there. We’re going in a few weeks time, so it’ll be before the exam, and that should help a lot. When I arrive I’ll be in full homework mode. If anyone tries to talk to me in English, rather than awkwardly explain that I am trying to learn I’m just doing to say “desculpe, sou Dinamarquês” and profess a total lack of knowledge of my own mother tongue in any form. Pro Skills.
*=I know, I know, we’re both in the EU so passports aren’t needed, but in these Brexity times who knows when Theresa May will decide to slam the borders shut?
The Practice Portuguese Podcast is really blossoming now that Joel is doing it full-time. There are some new videos on the site along with the usual podcast episodes, a pronunciation chart and new stuff being promised for the future. You can see the first two all three videos free on the site – 5000 Words You Already KnowOpen and Closed Vowels and Tools for learning European Portuguese (including the big reveal of their secret weapon in their war to make the world speak European Portuguese). Each one is a very specific examination of an aspect of the language that can help you move forward in vocabulary (first one) or pronunciation (second) and to get more Portuguese into your life in general (third). Actually, to tell the truth, the second one blew my mind a bit because I tried to listen without paying much attention and maybe I need to sit down again with it and put the effort in.
This is a corrected version of a spoken answer I gave to a question about a time I had been told off at school. My friend Márcio rewrote it in a more natural way to help me understand how it could be improved. I thought there were enough interesting mistakes getting corrected that it was worth transcribing the whole thing so I’d remember it better.
Eu estava na escola primária, há três anos quando* nós mudámos da casa. Eu e o meu irmão fomos para um nova escola primária, e quando estávamos na nova escola, havia um grupo de rapazes que decidiram que não gostavam de nós. Eram rapazes da minha turma** e da turma do meu irmão. Então eles disseram “Não gostamos de vocês! Vocês cheiram mal, então nós vamos bater-vós”.
Depois da aula, houve uma grande luta, e de alguma forma, dois desses rapazes malcriados ficaram magoados. Eu fiquei muito orgulhoso por ter sido capaz de me defender a mim e o meu irmão, mas infelizmente a professora não pensou da mesma forma de nós
*=I tried to write it as “quando tinha estado na escola” – literally “when I had been at school…” to see how well awkward British past tenses translated to Portuguese. The answer seems to be “not well”.
**=Turma = Class (in school)
My original speech was a great deal wordier than, so it’s nice to see it written out tidily like this. I seem to be making a lot of ser/estar type errors, as well as the occasional “estar” where a “ficar” would be better. These are all things I know but as usual they just don’t come out in the heat of the moment.
Yesterday I made a horrific discovery, namely that the phrase “pode ser” didn’t mean what I thought it meant. It really shook me to the core, because it was one of the stout workhorses of my vocabulary, ready to come out at a moment’s notice and bridge a gap in a sentence. As I said to my friend Márcio, who first questioned it:
Sobre “pode ser”: acreditei que significava “maybe” (talvez) mas perguntei a minha esposa e ela disse que quer dizer “It may be”, nem “maybe”.
Estou em choque. Foi uma das primeiras palavras/expressões que aprendi. Sinto-me como alguém informou-me que “obrigado” não significa “Thank you” ou “bom dia” não significa “good morning”. Devo deitar uns minutos…
I enjoyed this because aside from being a good song in its own right, it’s a very rare example of a song in Portuguese that I can understand almost 100% without help
The guy singing it seems a little aggrieved with the views of the ladies in his life. Perhaps not quite ready to order his “Meninist” t-shirt online, but he’s definitely disgruntled. Well, that’s OK, we all have bad days, and he got a good song out of it, so who’s complaining? There doesn’t seem to be a translation online so I’ve done one myself
Os Maridos das Outras / Other People’s Husbands
Everyone knows men are brutes
Who leave beds unmade
And things unsaid
They’re not very astute, they’re not very astute
Everyone knows men are brutes
Everyone knows men are ugly
They leave conversations unfinished
And laundry to pick up
And they’re evasive, and they’re evasive*
Everyone knows men are ugly
But other people’s husbands, no
Because other people’s husbands are
The archetype of perfection
The pinnacle of creation
Docile creatures of a completely different species
Who always make their wives’ friends happy
And everything men don’t do
Everything men aren’t, everything men aren’t
Other people’s husbands are, other people’s husbands are
Everyone knows men are rubbish
They like music nobody likes
And never lay the table
Lower than a beast, lower than a beast
Everyone knows men are rubbish
Everyone knows men are animals
Who smell strongly of wine
And never know which way to go
Na na na na na na, na na na na na**
Everyone knows men are animals
But other people’s husbands, no
Because other people’s husbands are
The archetype of perfection
The pinnacle of creation
Amiable creatures of a completely different species
Who always make their wives’ friends happy
And everything men don’t do
Everything men aren’t, everything men aren’t
Other people’s husbands are, other people’s husbands are
*=”E vem com rodeios” actually means “they come with roundabouts”. I’m guessing the figurative meaning of this but I could be wrong.
So here’s a good example of half-understanding a song and completely missing the point. I always thought this song was about a Moorish (Moroccan, Saracen, Muslim) sorcerer of some kind, but swotting up on my Ana Moura lyrics ahead of next week’s concert, I found out that it’s not that at all. Apparently a Moura is a fairy-tale creature from old Galician and portuguese legends. Reading the description on the Wikipedia page, it sounds an awful lot like a djinn/genie of Arabic folktales, so it’s not wholly fanciful that the moor in the sense of Moorish invaders (Mouros) and the Mouro/Moura of legend are bound up in some way, but it certainly illustrates the point that relying on half-understanding most of the words in a song can be deceptive!
I put this in Twitter the other day but it seemed relevant to the blog too: I was playing with the subtitle feature on youtube to see if it would recognise what I was saying as actual Portuguese words but I left it on English language, and…
Me: Youtube, can you auto-subtitle my video? Youtube: Can't, busy being possessed by Satan pic.twitter.com/Pm6gF0D19A
In the third of what I am now definitely thinking of my Four Evil Exes articles, here’s what I can find on the subject of remembering which nouns are masculine and which feminine. It turned out to be easier than I thought, although I’m sure the exceptions will plague me. I wish I’d done it ages ago, actually, but that’s the trouble with the 4 evil exes: they are boring and difficult and don’t have fun workarounds I can use, so it was just a case of ploughing through the literature – in this case, “Portuguese – an Essential Grammar” by Amélia Hutchinson and Janet Lloyd, with some supplemental examples cribbed from Fun With Portuguese and My Five Romances. I also got some tips from Benny the Irish Polyglot and read an entertaining post on the subject by Lady of the Cakes, whose blog is a great deal prettier and better-written than mine. Her post is a bit more pessimistic when it comes to finding patterns in this mess, but on the plus side does have (a) a picture of some cake and (b) rude words.
As you can see, most of the rules have exceptions, so it’s not as if I can be guaranteed to never screw up again if I learn them but if I don’t happen to know a word, it might boost my hit-rate a few percentage points.In most cases, more specific rules seem to override more general ones. So for example, “milhão” is masculine because it meets the “all numbers are masculine” rule even though it’s an abstract noun ending in -ão.
Oh and sorry about the colour-scheme, but… well, you know…
Rule
Examples
Exceptions
Dependent:
Male and Female animals/people depend on individual’s sex*
o touro / a vaca
o irmão / a irmã
Dependent:
Ordinal numbers depend what’s being counted
o primeiro (dia)
a segunda (noite)
Masculine:
Nouns ending in
-o (nb, not -ão though)
-r
-l
-z
o lugar
o valor
o papel
o final
o rapaz
a foto
a tribo
a gravidez (understandably enough…)
Masculine:
Concrete nouns ending in
-e**
-ão***
o sangue
o clube
o coração
o chão
o órgão
a fonte
a árvore
a mão
a televisão
Masculine:
Names of Lakes, Rivers, Mountains etc
o Tejo
os Himalaias
o Brasil
o Atlântico
o Tamisa (despite the -a ending!)
Masculine:
Car brands**** & types of wines
o porto
o Ferrari
a Mercedes
Masculine:
The seasons*****
o verão
o inverno
o outono
a primavera
Masculine:
Weekend days
o sábado
o domingo
Masculine:
Words from greek, usually ending -a: most usually in
-ema
-grama
-eta
o programa
o problema
o sistema
o poema
o cometa
o planeta
o dia
o mapa
o clima
o telefonema
Masculine:
Letters
o a
o p
Masculine:
Cardinal numbers
o um
o cento
o milhão
Feminine:
Most words ending in
-a
a dúvida
a água
a palavra
a terra
Feminine:
Words ending
-dade
-ie
-tude
-gem
-ice
-ã
a cidade
a viagem
a garagem
a juventude
a espécie
a velhice
Feminine:
Abstract nouns ending in
-e
-ão***
a crise
a parte
a gente
a lição
o norte
Feminine:
Names of towns & countries
A Madeira
A Rússia
A França
A Suiça
A Islândia
A Londres
Places specifically named after male things:
O Rio de Janeiro
O São Paulo
O Porto
Places consisting of a male noun + adjective
Reino Unido
Os Estados Unidos
Feminine:
Names of the Arts and Sciences
a medicina
a matemática
a biologia
o teatro
o cinema
Feminine:
Names of days during the working week
a segunda feira
a terça feira
*=This rule supersedes all others. So “a mulher” is feminine even though it ends with r, for example
**=When looking for samples of nouns ending in -e as examples to use of concrete (masculine) and abstract (feminine) it was striking how many exceptions there were to this rule on the list. I’ve left it in because it’s in the textbook but, at least with the more common nouns, it seems like feminine outnumbers masculine for most -e nouns, even the concrete ones
***=When looking for samples of nouns ending in -ão as examples to use of concrete (masculine) and abstract (feminine) it was striking that the first twenty or so -ão words on this list were all abstract, feminine ones
****= Jeremy Clarkson would love this, I’m sure
*****=one exception out of four words is pretty shonky though. It’s only one away from a 50-50 split! Maybe best remember these by their endings and pretend the rule doesn’t exist!
Luso 