César from the Homo Causticus blog gave me a challenge a few days ago, to write about Brazilian Portuguese. Since this is a blog about European Portuguese, I thought the best way to do that would be to compare the two flavours. I’ve written it in English and then translated each paragraph into Portuguese as I go, just for the challenge. Thanks to dani_morgenstern and butt_roidholds for the corrections, but it’s quite long so if I have missed any errors, that’s all on me.
I quite often see people online asking what is the difference between Brazilian and European Portuguese and sometimes people will reply “there’s no difference, it’s just the accent”. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. The accents certainly are different, but there’s a lot more to it than that. If you’re starting out on your Portuguese journey, you should definitely stick to just one version at first, at least until you have a good grounding in the language, because in addition to the accent you’ll find Brazilian Portuguese has quite a lot of differences in vocabulary, slightly different grammar, differences in spelling, even after the Acordo Ortográfico. They even have different ways of saying “you”. Brazil is a larger country with a more powerful media industry so I think Brazilians are probably less aware of the differences than Portuguese people are because they are less likely to be exposed to TV or movies in the other dialect.
Muitas vezes, vejo pessoas online a perguntar qual é a diferença entre Português brasileiro e Português europeu, e às vezes a resposta é “não há diferença, só há sotaques diferentes. Hum… Até certo ponto, Senhor Cobre*. Os sotaques são mesmo diferentes mas há mais do que isso. Se estiveres no início da tua “viagem” portuguesa, recomendo que permaneces com um único dialeto do idioma até ficares mais confiante porque, além do sotaque, irás achar que o português brasileiro tem diferenças de vocabulário, uma gramática ligeiramente alterada, algumas variações de ortografia (apesar do AO) e até uma outra maneira de usar o pronome da segunda pessoa singular. Brasil é um país maior com uma mídia mais ativa, portanto acho que os habitantes estão menos conscientes da distância entre os dois, porque estão menos expostos aos meios de comunicação do outro lado do Atlântico.
Of course, both countries have a range of accents, but in very general terms, Brazilians tend to be a lot easier to understand. They pronounce a lot of things in really surprising ways, but once you tune into it, it’s at least pretty clear. They don’t swallow as many letters, and you don’t find yourself struggling to pick out four or five words that have all been run together. The main thing that sounds weird to European ears is the way Ds and Ts sound when they appear before an E or an I. The D in a word like Divertir, say, sounds like a hard J, or like the DG sound in the English word “edge”. Meanwhile, the T in the same word sounds like the CH sound in a word like “Chips” . Check this page for an example. Brazilians also tend to hit vowels with a bit more emphasis, including the last syllable in a word ending in e. A word like “verdade” for example would be a two syllable word in Portuguese because the final E practically disappears and the D has a pleasing breathy quality to it (I really like it!). The same word in Brazilian has three syllables and sounds like “verDADgee”. There are examples of both on this page for you to compare. The effect is that Brazilian Portuguese has a “bouncier” rhythm to it.
Claro que ambos os países têm um leque de sotaques, portanto não faz sentido falar de “sotaque português” e “sotaque brasileiro” mas, regra geral, os brasileiros são mais fáceis de entender. O seu modo de falar tem aspetos muito estranhos (aos nossos ouvidos anglófilos), mas uma vez que nos acustomamos aos sons e aos ritmos, é bastante claro. Não engolem tantas letras e não deixam as palavras aglomerarem-se umas com as outras, dizendo “quéq tázafazer” em vez de “O que é que estás a fazer”. O que mais marca um aluno europeu é a sua maneira de pronunciar os Ds e os Ts que vêm antes dum É ou dum I. O “D”, numa palavra como “Divertir”, soa como um J duro ou o DG de “edge” em inglês. Os brasileiros também pronunciam os vogais com mais stresse, inclusive a última sílaba duma palavra que termine com E. Uma palavra como “verdade”, por exemplo, tem duas sílabas em português de Portugal. O “E” final quase desaparece e o “D” soa suave e ofegante (adoro!). No Brasil, a mesma palavra tem três sílabas distintas porque o “E” é mais forte. Além disso o “D” antes do “É” muda para DG como já disse: verDADgee. Isso significa que o português brasileiro tem um ritmo mais…hum… saltitante, digamos assim…?*
*Throughout this paragraph I originally used feminine articles for the names of letters “a D” and so on, because the word letra itself is feminine, but apparently when you use the name of the letter in its own you’re really indicating symbol /sign so you use male articles “o D”. I was referred to a Ciberdúvidas article on the subject.
You /Tu
There are lots of different ways of addressing someone in the second person. In European Portuguese it’s usually Tu for informal situations but there are gradations of formality that require “você” ou “o senhor” or whatever, and the verbs all get conjugated in the third person. There’s also this weird pronoun “vós” that most textbooks just ignore. Let’s try not to even think about that one. In Brazil, on the other hand, it’s just você across the board, and you only really need to learn first and third person verb endings. These people learning Brazilian Portuguese have it easy eh?
Há muitos métodos de falar com alguém na segunda pessoa em português. Em Portugal, é geralmente “tu” no dia-a-dia, mas em situações mais formais, usa-se você ou “o senhor” ou algo do género, que exige um verbo na terceira pessoa. Ainda por cima existe o pronome vós que se usa em determinados contextos (embora a maioria dos livros sobre gramática portuguesa para estrangeiros o ignorem) mas nem pensemos nisso. No Brasil, pelo contrário, usa-se sempre você. Aquelas pessoas que aprendem português brasileiro têm uma vida fácil, né?
Vocabulary /Vocabulário
Like US English, Brazilian portuguese has evolved slightly differently and diverged from its European cousin. In some cases, it has retained aspects of the language that the Portuguese have dropped (sorry, I’m not going to give any examples of this because I’d be out of my depth but I’ve been told it’s true). In other cases, they have developed new words over the course of years, based on preference, contact with other languages and just the sheer passage of time. Of course, this is going to be most obvious in slang. My favourite example of diverging vocabulary is the translation of “The Girl on the Train” by Paula Hawkins. In Portugal it’s called “A Rapariga No Comboio” but nobody in Brazil says Comboio, even though it’s a legitimate word in Brazilian Portuguese, they say Trem instead, and although Rapariga does exist it’s… Not a nice word. So the book is called A Garota No Trem instead.
Assim como o inglês americano, o português do brasil evoluiu diferentemente e afastou-se do seu primo europeu. Em determinados casos, retém aspetos antigos da língua, que já desapareceram do português europeu (desculpa, não tenho exemplos mas ouvi falar disto). Noutros casos, desenvolvem-se novas palavras e expressões ao longo dos anos, por causa de preferências regionais, do contacto com outras idiomas e da passagem de anos. Claro, este fenómeno é mais óbvio no calão. O meu exemplo preferido de divergência de vocabulário é a tradução do “The Girl on the Train” de Paula Hawkins. Em Portugal, o título do livro é “A Rapariga no Comboio” mas no Brasil ninguém diz “comboio”, mesmo que a palavra exista, antes dizem “trem”. E rapariga existe também mas no Brasil, é uma palavra feia. Portanto o livro foi intitulado “A Garota No Trem”
Grammar /Gramática
There are only a couple of differences in the actual grammatical structure, so far as I’m aware, but feel free to shout out any others in the comments. Firstly, in Brazilian Portuguese, the object pronoun basically always comes before the noun, so it’s more consistent. So “I bought it” = “o comprei” in Brazil and “I didn’t buy it” is “não o comprei”, whereas in Portugal it would vary according to context: “comprei-o in most cases, but it flips in negative sentences (“não o comprei”) or a few other contexts (more detail here if this is not familiar).
The other big one is the use of the gerund. Again, I’m afraid this is another area where Brazilian is probably easier than European Portuguese, at least for English speakers. In European Portuguese if you want to say “I’m talking” you say “estou a falar”, which is fine, but falar is an infinitive so if you translate it literally you get “I am to speak”. Brazilians just say “estou falando”. Falando is a gerund, so it is really equivalent to “talking”, in English, so in short, it’s much more like English grammar.
Tanto quanto sei, há apenas duas diferenças de gramática. O primeiro tem a ver com a próclise e a ênclise. A próclise aplicar-se quase sempre em português brasileiro – ou seja, o complemento vem sempre antes do verbo (O comprei /Não o comprei) . Em Portugal, por outro lado, a posição depende do contexto (Comprei-o /Não o comprei)
A segunda diferença é o uso do gerúndio em tempos verbais do presente contínuo. Este é mais um exemplo dum aspecto da língua no qual o português brasileiro é mais fácil (para nós anglófonos) do que o europeu. O brasileiro “estou falando” soa mais parecido com o inglês “I’m talking” ao contrário ao português europeu, no qual se usa o infinitivo, tipo “estou a falar” que soa estranho aos nossos ouvidos.
Spelling / Ortografia
And so finally we reach spelling. Well, that’s easy, the AO has sorted it all, right? Sadly, no, there are still a few spelling variations around. Brazilians seem to like circumflexes (^) more than the Portuguese do but there are far fewer than there once were.
Finalmente chegamos à ortografia. Foi tudo resolvido pelo AO, certo? Infelizmente não, porque ainda existem várias diferenças de ortografia. Acho que os brasileiros gostam mais do acento circunflexo, mas, hoje em dia, não há assim tantas diferenças entre os dois dialectos.
This is a rundown of online learning resources you can use to learn portuguese, whether in the form of an app, a youtube channel or a podcast. I have split it off from the portuguese language-hacking page which was getting quite long. If you’re in the market for books to help you learn portuguese you might also want to take a look at a separate page I’ve made about those.
Specific Language Apps
The main gripe of students learning european portuguese always has to do with Duolingo’s Brazilian bias. basically, don’t bother with it. It’s a good tool for most languages, but for European Portuguese it’s a total non-starter.
So what to use instead? Well, the most obvious candidate is the Practice Portuguese App. This has been a long time in the making: the boys have been doing a podcast and video series for ages and established themselves as the frontrunners for most new learners but there’s an app now to bring it all together. It’ll cost you a subscription fee of course, because they are doing it full time and now have an extra mouth to feed, but if you can afford it I think this looks like a pretty good way to go.
Memrise is the other big favourite. It’s a funny old app that has a hard division in its navigation as if it were two apps fused together. I actually think that might even be in purpose: back in the day, it was a more straightforward vocabulary app: you could make decks and view other people’s. The quality was variable and some contained errors, and its selling point was that you could add “mems” (visual reminders) to words that you found hard to remember. Then they started scaling up operations and interviewing native speakers to create new courses. The decks still exist but the mems are gone and it’s sort of peripheral to what is now the core functionality, consisting in curated flashcard decks, videos and AI-driven interactive conversation scenarios. Once you are in the main content screen, it’s almost impossible to get back to the user-created content. In fact, I just tried, and I don’t think it’s possible at all within the app. Yeah – look, here’s a note about it! On the website, if you go to add a new course you still have the option of clicking on courses created by users and there they all are, but I think all my old user-created decks are now off-limits on the app. Oh… I’m a bit sad about that, actually. It was the main feature I used!
There are lots of other vocabulary apps but some are a bit ropey. If you want to take a look, you could try this blog post by Marlon Sabala. I’m told by the cool kids that Anki is the best free vocabulary app, and some people love Quizlet.
iTalki. Lingq and Hellotalk are useful apps that can help you find formal or informal tuition, language exchanges and so on. Another alternative, if you don’t want to speak to a human, is to just open ChatGPT and type “vamos falar português europeu” , then take it from there.
Finally, Lyricstraining is a website, and it has a linked app called Lingoclip. Both let you play multiple choice games based on music videos by european portuguese artists (among many others). It’s pretty good, steering the line between study and things you can actually do for fun.
Most of the newspapers and broadcasters have their own apps too, and you can set them up to bombard you with portuguese destaques (headlines) throughout the day, and some of the language translation sites like Google Translate, Deepl, Reverso-Contexto and Linguee have apps too.
Youtube Channels by Portuguese Teachers
These have really mushroomed since I wrote the original version of this page. I think the pandemic has made all the difference. Lots of teachers have moved online to gain new students that can have lessons over Skype. Here are a few I know about. I’ll just link one random video of each instead of describing them so you can see which ones appeal to you. [Update: 5 December 2023 – I have purged a few of the videos on this page, mainly where they hadn’t actually recorded anything for a while]
Obviously since Liz is british you might wonder if you’ll miss out on some of the familiarity that a native speaker has, but unless you’re already jedi level, I doubt you’ll spot any slips: she’s extremely good, and you might find that – having been in your shoes – she knows where you’re coming from when you say you need the difference between ser and estar explained or whatever it might be.
Leo is able to convey difficult concepts very clearly and that’s why he’s very popular at the moment. Everyone seems to have him on their watchlist.
Mia Esmeriz has another popular channel that comes up a lot in lists of recommendations
I don’t watch many videos by learn European Portuguese Online but weirdly my wife sent me one of her videos today so she must have impressed at least one native speaker and that deserves some credit!
Catarina of the Portuguese Unschool takes an unconventional approach to learning and so she doesn’t do a lot of the usual videos most teachers make, she comes up in your timeline saying unexpected stuff and wearing intersting hats, so if you like your portuguese a bit punktuguese, have a look.
And here’s an honourable mention for this chap who has been missing in action for a few months, so I should probably not include him since I have deleted everyone else who hasn’t posted in that long, but I have faith that he’s out there somewhere and will return. Portuguese Dips makes some really good “shorts” that explain odd little expressions that most teachers wouldn’t think to mention, so he’s definitely worth a subscription!
Social Media Places
Facebook has a few groups where expats and other learners gather to compare notes, like this, and there are usually teachers around offering help and cultivating potential customers. There’s an active Portuguese subreddit too and the level of portuguese tends to be a bit higher than on Facebook. I’m sure most social media sites that allow more than 280 characters probably have something similar so they’re worth looking at too.
Websites
Thanks to Rox for suggesting some new additions to this section
Dialang from Lancaster University has a series of tests that will give you an idea of how good you are at the language. It won’t really teach you anything but it might be good if, say, you wanted to decide what exam you could reasonably aim for with the knowledge you have now, or what level book to buy.
Brulingua.brussels is a site designed for people living in and around Brussels, presumably as a way of ensuring communication among EU employees. You’ll need to give it a random Brussels postcode from this website to set up an account. It covers A1-B2, broken into sections, has a live lesson option and built-in tests.
DailyNata is an email subscription service which will send you little digestible nuggets of basic portuguese twice a week. It seems like a good one for newbies
Linguno has fairly basic online exercises in vocabulary and conjugation. Ideally suited to people who like learning from penguins
Conjuga-me (excellent website that summarises all the verb tenses for a given verb. Definitely one to bookmark!)
Linguee (it took me ages to see the usefulness of this, but if you search for a word, either in english or portuguese, it’ll give you actual human-created translations in real books or official publications so that you can get a feel for the way it’s translated in context)
Readlang (directory of native speakers reading texts)
Ciberdúvidas (Q&A about the portuguese language, written in portuguese, so quite advanced!)
Youglish is a site that makes it easy to find subtitled videos in a specific language with specific words in the transcript, and – here’s the best part – it even let’s you specify European or Brazilian portuguese! Unlike YouTube it doesn’t give you a post to choose from. If you pick a word like “Guerra” for example, it takes you to a video play list with 198(!) videos in it and the first one is queued up right before the person says the word. So you can hear that and, if you want, scroll back and forth. Then you click forward to the next video and maybe it’s a song that contains the word, or whatever, and you can skip ahead, hearing the word in different contexts. It’s pretty clever.
Ciberescola…. exists… I don’t know what to tell you about this one. It sends you to register in patreon and then you can see some slightly half-arsed lessons. If you’re a teacher you can request a login… What’s going on? I gave up.
NFLC has a small but interesting selection of “Continental” (ie European) Portuguese lessons. You have to create a login of course, but that’s easy to do and doesn’t cost anything. There are a couple of drawbacks: the interface takes a bit of getting used to, and the interviews all seem to be about ten years old so they are relating to the political scene was it was in the wake of the banking crisis, not really now. There’s also an app called Lectia attached to the site but I found it a bit Brazil-heavy and didn’t persevere with it.
The US Defence Language Institute has a bunch of exercises with quizzes, covering a whole range of languages, including Portuguese. This one is easier to navigate than NFLC but it’s a similar idea: a few comprehension tests for intermediate learners.
Podcasts, like Youtube Channels, have seen a real growth since the start of the pandemic when a lot of teachers were trying to get started in online teacching. Most have their own websites but you can find them on most podcast apps too. When I first made this page there were only 4. Here’s a selection of favourites. I’ve put them in order of difficulty with the easiest first.
Portuguese with Carla is really focused. Carla and her husband Marlon take a short piece of dialogue and break it down in minute detail, encouraging listeners to follow and repeat the words. It is definitely a good place to start if you have no Portuguese at all or if you want to work on your pronunciation. They have a few weird theories about how smelling herbs helps you learn but no worries; I’ve tried it without performance-enhancing oregano and it has been very helpful.
Portuguese Lab Podcast. This one has really come on in leaps and bounds lately and is doing a lot of interesting stuff. Definitely worth a look
Learning Portuguese Is Fun is a new one. It has pretty interesting topics and it presents them clearly to be accessible to relative newcomers. More recently (late Summer 2023) it has shifted the emphasis to ore intermediate/advanced learners.
Practice Portuguese is everyone’s go-to podcast for European Portuguese, and if you speak to other portuguese learners they’ll usually mention it within the first ten minutes. It’s produced by a native Portuguese guy called Rui, who does most of the talking and Joel, who is Canadian and adds a learner’s perspective to some of the dialogues. Since I wrote the first version of this post, they have also launched a second podcst called Portuguese Shorties. Pro-tip: if you try the original podcast, don’t listen to it in order because the earliest ones are some of the more challenging. You’re better off looking on the website, where they have a filter system that lets you choose your difficulty level, or just start with the most recent ones and work your way backwards.
Say it in Portuguese is the most advanced of all, I think. Each episode deals with an idiomatic expression and explains its use and meaning. It’s great if you are working at the B1/B2 level, but it takes no prisoners, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it if you’re starting out. Some of the later episodes have a brazilian co-host. Again, if you are well along in your portuguese journey that probably won’t phase you too much, but avoid it if you think you might be confused by it.
Taking a left-turn at the traffic lights, there are some good, inspirational podcasts for language-learners in general. Have a look at “Actual Fluency” or “Creative Language Learning” in your podcast app, for example. Personally, I can only take this kind of thing in small doses, but a little of it now and again is good. It reminds you that you’re not alone and it gives you some ideas from the hardcore language-ninjas.
Exam Preparation
When you’re ready to take the exam, you might want to find study resources that are specifically geared toward preparation for the exam itself. If you already have a teacher, they might be able to help but if you don’t, you could try Say It In Portuguese’s course, tailored specifically to exam prep. There are a few online examplars you can look at if you would prefer to go it alone. I blogged about what I could find a couple of years ago but things might have moved on since then. And don’t forget to read my own accounts of taking the exam for the first time.
It’s always a good idea to have some tricks up your sleeve for learning languages when you don’t feel like it, when you want to increase the density of your target language in your life, or when you just want a change of pace. Here are a few of my favourite techniques with a Portuguese flavour – mostly but not exclusively European.
Turn Yourself Into A Walking Billboard
Despite being old enough to know better, I like t-shirt slogans. Fortunately by this time, most people are aware that Frankie Says Relax and that they should Just Do It, thanks to my tireless efforts. Here’s a thought though: how about getting a t-shirt with a portuguese slogan on it? Not only will the phrase itself stick in your mind, but you’ll also be advertising your openness to the language to anyone who happens to be staring at your boobs/moobs at the time. This is a good way of starting a convresation, even if that onversation is only “Olhe, os meus olhos estão cá em cima!”
I use a site called Cão Azul that has a pretty decent selection, mainly in portuguese but with some english ones too. You should find something you like there. I also have the “Levar Uma Descasca” t-shirt in blue from Portuguese with Carla.
Or you could carry your groceries in a tote bag with a portuguese slogan. Bertrand have a few for example. This is a bit more discreet, which may or may not be what you want. There’s also a site called Inspirações Portuguesas which sells all kinds of shirts, bags, teatowels and other gifts with fun slogans on them – this one, for example. This is a new discovery for me but I am definitely going to put in an order when I next have a bit of cash in the bank.
I even used to have writing on my face with one of the amazingly cool anti-covid masks from d’enfiada. Mine said “Sorri Com os Olhos” and I loved it so much it was almost worth having a pandemic for. Sadly, I’ve lost it now and they aren’t selling them any more. Ah well, with a bit of luck there’ll be another pandemic and they’ll come back. That’s a joke, by the way, in case Peter Hitchens is reading this and thinks I mean it.
I guess the only thing I don’t recommend, I think, is overdoing it. Wearing a portuguese t-shirt and a portuguese mask while carrying a portuguese tote-bag all at the same time is too needy!
Lie
So, see if this sounds like a familiar scenario: You have lured a portuguese vict… er, I mean friend into your vicinity, maybe using one of the t-shirts mentioned in the paragaph above. But they have got closer and they see you have a distinctly northern european look about you. You open your mouth and you clearly have an accent so they very helpfully start speaking english to you. How do you persuade them to stop being so lovely and helpful? “Não falo inglês” you say. “Sou dinamarquês”. Pretending to be danish is my main contribution to the art of language learning. Nobody speaks danish, so if you tell them that’s where your accent’s from, you can look forward to having the conversation in portuguese instead.
Put Your Apps To Work
There are a few good apps specifically devoted to learning portuguese now (more about that on the learning resource page), but what about the times you aren’t actively learning? How do you passively learn portuguese while doing other things? It’s relatively easy to find good games and many of them have other language settings. I started with a copy of Trivia Crack which I’d set on Portuguese so I can enjoy farting about playing games and still be learning new words, phrases and pop culture references and (crucially) facts about Brazilian football. It has its drawbacks of course: most of the questions are written by Brazilians so you get quite a lot of Brazilian grammar in there, but still, it’s more educational than Angry Birds.
Once you realise that any game can be portuguesified, the world is your lobster. Usually it’s Brazilian portuguese, but since you’re not specifically learning grammar, it’s not too confusing. Over the years, I have tried several and I’ve learned a few new words that way without it feeling like work. Here’s June’s Journey, for example. It’s a sort of detective game, where you win by spotting objects in a picture. You need to do it against a timer, so you get quite fast at matching the word with the object. My daughter has played in French and it was the most fun she’s ever had doing homework.
A lot of people I know have been using apps like Geography Quiz to learn names and flags of countries. I think my knowledge of geography is pretty passable thanks to a youth wasted collecting commonwealth stamps, but I’ve been playing the game anyway, with the language settings tweaked, to learn the names of countries in portuguese.
Quite a few word games have portuguese versions – so there’s Termo (portuguese Wordle), Ligações (portuguese connections), and a bunch of games on Tal Canal (my favourite is Quina)
Then there’s The Interactive Adventure of Dog Mendonça and Pizzaboy, based on the graphic novels by Filipe Melo and Juan Cavia. The sound is in english for some reason but the text is all portuguese. It’s available on Steam as well as mobile devices. Oh and you might enjoy the André Ventura Dating Simulator if you have a very specific sense of humour…
Fill Your Ears With Podcast Goodness
If you’ve got some mindless task to perform, such as hoovering, ironing or writing a speech for Donald Trump, don’t listen to the new Stray Kids album, listen to someone speaking portuguese instead. Portuguese (as opposed to Brazilian) podcasts are hard to find on Apple iTunes, but I’ve recently started listening to podcasts on my phone instead of an ipod, which has changed my life, because Podcast Guru makes it much, much easier to find them. The trick is to open the confurations and set it to treat Portugal as your home country. Doing this means you’ll be shown a range of local podcasts, and it’ll save you a lot of tedious legwork.
Obviously listening to podcasts is pretty challenging, because they’re aimed at a home audience, not at learners, but it’s a great way of developing listening skills if you don’t mind a challenge! I don’t recommend this for absolute beginners. I listened to a lot of RTP podcasts early on but I couldn’t follow them and drifted off, so I think it just taught me to not pay attention when a portuguese person is speaking. Not exactly a good habit! There are plenty of podcasts aimed specifically at learners and I’ve listed those in the portuguese learning resources page, so check those out if that sounds less daunting.
One strategy for finding something to listen to is to search the podcast directory for portuguese words that interest you (futebol, livros, telemóveis etc),. You might find some are in spanish or in brazilian portuguese but hopefully if you have folowed the suggestion above, about changing your app configuration, that will be kept to a minimum. Another route is to look for specific portuguese broadcaster like “rádio comercial”, RTP or TSF and see what they have to offer. Or search for the name of a celebrity you like and see if anything comes up. Here are a few I like in order of difficulty (easiest first). If you are struggling, some podcast apps, including the aforementioned Podcast Guru – allows you to change the playback speed so it’s more manageable.
Sbroing Probably the easiest portuguese podcast, since it’s aimed at children. They did a whole recording of “O Principezinho” (The Little Prince) that has expired from iTunes but you can still download it from the site by clicking on 2015 in the blog archive links on the right hand side.
Casa Trabalho Casa is nice and short and the theme is always about work/life balance so a lot of the episodes will include language borrowed from english (internet, business, lifestyle terms, mainly) which means you’re dealing with less unfamiliar vocabulary.
Pessoal e Transmissível Interviews with people from all walks of life. The podcast isn’t being made any more but there are hundreds of old ones still available on iTunes.
Conta-me Tudo Live Storytelling in the style of “The Moth”, so if you like that kind of thing, you might like this. I find it quite hard to follow the live recording, unfortunately
Caderneta De Cromos A series on Rádio Comercial about eighties pop culture, covering Star Trek, Pat Benatar, Ghostbusters, Space 1999, Rocky, Pac Man… All the good stuff. Nuno Markl, the host of this show has done lots of podcasts, most famously “O Homem Que Mordeu o Cão” so if you like this you could look him up and choose from a variety. It’s quite fast though, and often there are a lot of people talking over each other which doesn’t help!
Taking a left-turn at the traffic lights, there are some good, inspirational podcasts for language-learners in general. Have a look at “Actual Fluency” or “Creative Language Learning” in your podcast app, for example. Personally, I can only take this kind of thing in small doses, but a little of it now and again is good. It reminds you that you’re not alone and it gives you some ideas from the hardcore language-ninjas.
Read A Book…
If you like reading, you might be wondering how to get started reading portuguese. It’s a long topic. I wrote a couple of blog posts a while ago about this if you’d like to get some ideas. One is about choosing a portuguese book to read and the other has some suggestions about the actual mechanics of reading in another language.
If a whole novel sounds daunting, don’t despair, some of them are pretty simple. For example, one of the sites I link to is Storyglot which has manageably-sized stories in ebook and audio format that are targeted for specific language learning stage.
Watch Portuguese Videos Online
Try turning on the TV if you’re in Portugal, you lucky buggers. If you haven’t already seen it, have a look at the video about learning with the TV on the Youtube channel “Talk the Streets“, which will tell you the best way to use portuguese TV. If you’re like me and live on a small island off the coast of France, try RTP Play, SIC or TVI. It isn’t all available outside Portugal but there are some good ones. I’ve recently finished A Crónica Dos Bons Malandros, for example, and that’s a lot of fun (but hard!) and Por do Sol is great too: it’s a sort of spoof telenovela (soap opera).
Netflix e Resfriar
If you have Netflix… Well, this is the section that I need to update most since I wrote the first draft of this page. First of all, what’s available might depend on where you are. This page claims there are some older filmes like “Pátio das Cantigas” on Netflix. Well, maybe in Portugal there are, but you can’t watch them where I live in the UK as far as I can see, so check your listings, but as far as I can tell, it’s a no.
At the time of writing there are two big-budget series in European Portuguese made by Netflix: Glória, which I’ve seen and quite enjoyed, although it didn’t blow my socks off. It’s set during the Cold War and deals with an anti-soviet radio station broadcasting in the country at the time. Then there’s Rabo de Peixe, which is like Whisky Galore, but with Cocaine instead of Whisky, and the Açores instead of the scottish isles. It’s exhausting, actually. Starts off OK, with old ladies dipping their bacalhau in cocaine instead of flour, but after a while there’s so much smoking and snorting that you just want to go and have a cup of tea. It looks great though. A third series – “Até que a Vida nos Separe” is on Netflix but (I believe) was bought from another station. Haven’t seen it but it’s on my list.
If stand-up comedy is more your thing, try looking for Salvador Martinha’s “Tip of the Tongue”. He’s a comedian, and his show was the only legit European Portuguese offering on UK Netflix for years and years until Glória finally came out.
In late 2022 there was a release of films by portuguese directors called “A Metamorfose dos Pássaros”, “Soa”, “Mar”, “Desterro” and “Simon Chama”. I’ve watched a couple of these and found them a bit dull which hasn’t really made me eager to watch the rest I’m afraid.
It’s definitely worth getting hold of a browser extension called Language reactor and using that in conjunction with Netflix because you’ll get a better idea of what’s being said. You can double-up the subtitles in english and portuguese and it makes the whole experience much, much easier and more effective.
Youtube
There’s quite a bit on Youtube. Before you even start make sure you get hold of the language learning app for YouTube, which gives you a whole lot of extra options. In addition to whole films (which you can find at CinemaPortugues or The Portuguese Film Archive), Youtube is a great source for things like documentaries and vlogs. If you can find a channel that broadcasts regular updates on a subject you like, it’s a huge incentive to listen regularly, and you’ll find Youtube helps you along by suggesting similar things to try.
Criteria to use when picking a channel might be:
Does the subject matter interest me? (obviously!)
Is the presenter engaging,
Do they share my tastes in books/ motorbikes/ fashion/ antique silver cowcreamers/ whatever? A lot of Youtube videos are made by younger people, so you if you’re an old fart like me you might have to hunt around for people who have interests outside the young adult mainstream.
Do they speak clearly?
I am a huge fan of books, so I started out googling “livros” and various other likely-sounding portuguese words until I managed to find the portuguese booktube community. If you can include something specifically Portuguese, rather than Brazilian, that will save a lot of effort. So, in the case of books, try searching for the names of authors (“Nuno Nepomuceno”, say, or “Dulce Maria Cardoso”, or “João Tordo”) along with the word “opinião” (review) and you’ll probably hit a book blogger. I’ve recommended a few different channels in the past but there are so many I like, I don’t think I can just pick a few now. It’s a close-knit commuinity though and these three are probably the busiest and best-connected. If you watch them you’ll see other Booktubers mentioned and you can follow what sounds interesting.
Books and Beers (aka “Books, Less Beers and a Baby” these days!)
Some of what I think of as Youtubers aren’t youtubers at all. These young folks are abandoning it for these new modern platforms, dontcha know. So Literacidades and Shareyourgeekness are very much part of the online reading influencer set but they are only on Instagram.
For general interest bantz you might try Wuant (one of the most famous vloggers and a real prize douchebag), Ric Fazeres (legendary gamer), Hugo Barreto (Runner), Barbara Cardoso (just sort of talking about stuff – the channel was formerly known as “Qualquer Dia É Muito Tempo” and was listed in the podcast list in previous versions of this page but she seems only to be doing videos now I think), Por Falar Noutra Coisa (comedy stuff), Diogo Bataguas (who used to do a monthly satirical show which everyone loved, although he seems to have taken a step back lately), Bernardo Almeida (gadgets), Inês Rebelo (not a live channel, unfortunately, but worth watching her videos about McDonalds because they’re funny and disgusting) or Helfimed (archipelago news with an amazing Açorean accent)
Feel The Burn
While you’re on Youtube, a lot of us are exercising indoors these days, so another thing you could try is following along with a workout by a portuguese instructor. It’s pretty easy to follow because you can watch what the instructor is doing but in the meantime, you will be learning the names of the various stages of the workout, different muscle groups, and useful phrases like “just five more seconds” and “let’s do it!” which are vital in these hectic times. I put up a blog post about portuguese exercise videos recently so you’ll find some ideas there.
Oh and I just recently found a portuguese yoga instructor if you fancy a break from Yoga with Adrienne, try some Yoga with Diana instead, at The Ocean Yoga.
Of course, you don’t have to be limited to just following exercise videos: recipes, DIY tutorials and how-to videos will often show actions accompanied by narration, so it’s a good way to pick up vocabulary related to a specific theme.
Rock Out… Or Fado Out If You Prefer
I’m a bit ambivalent about music as a learning method. A lot of people recommend it, including my wife, but I often find it’s like watching as a stream of syllables rushes by at speed. I think unless you’ve taken trouble to read the lyrics written down beforehand and compare with a translation, it’s difficult to pick the words out and appreciate them and that’s why I’ve been doing more translations lately. Of course, you can still enjoy the music, but understanding the lyrics adds a whole other dimension. Most songs can be found on sites like lyricstranslate, and if you put some time into getting familiar with the meanings, it’ll pay off, I promise!
If there’s one thing Portugal has lots of, it’s music. Here are a few bands to try:
Oquestrada (careful with this one: they have some great songs but they occasionally sing in other languages – so don’t go accidentally learning french or anything!)
Expensive Soul (funky, souly sort of thing – works surprisingly well in portuguese)
Quim Barreiros (Like Benny Hill but with an accordion – that doesn’t do it justice though, It’s very portuguese. I can never hope to see the appeal)
Sara Tavares (watch out for the non-standard words and spellings though)
Salvador Sobral (another one who sometimes sings in other languages – but he’s the guy who won the Eurovsision for Portugal a few years ago, and he deserved it too!)
Marcia (there are a few singers called Marcia – I mean this one ↓ and no, I don’t know why she uses one random spanish pronoun in there either)
Here’s my Spotify playlist if Spotify is your thing
Turn on the Subtitles of Your DVDs
If you’re clever enough to understand films made in Portuguese, that’s a great way to learn more but it’s pretty challenging. You’re not helped by the fact that the Portuguese film industry is not particularly strong compared to Brazil, even, let alone Hollywood. Some of the old classics are excellent (but beware modern remakes of classics like O Pátio das Cantigas for example).
Some portuguese movies can be a bit grim though. Ossos, for example, is slow and turgid and has barely any dialogue in it so what’s the point? I have one called O Vale de Abraão which I’ve heard good things about but it looks pretty bleak too, and the bloody thing is three and a half hours long, so I’m putting it off…
Easier fare would be an English-Language film you’ve seen before, dubbed into Portuguese. That usually means children’s animated films, since nobody ever dubs live-action movies. Try and check that the actors doing the voice-overs aren’t Brazilian. The last thing you want is all that Eejy Beejy Beejy thing that Brazilians do. We have three dubbed films in the house and it’s good because my daughter likes watching them too. Turn on English subtitles if you are very new to the language, or Portuguese subtitles if you just want written clues to help you disentangle the words. Or neither if you’re a total badass.
Change the Way You Use The Web.
If you spend a lot of time online (ha ha ha, sorry, I’m kidding – obviously you do! It’s the twenty-first century and you probably haven’t left the house in weeks*!) why not challenge yourself to post in two languages, providing english and portuguese versions of your tweets, instagram captions and so on. You’ll lose some of your followers, but fuck ’em, if they can’t handle you in your lusophonic glory they don’t deserve you in anglo mode either. You’ll get better, more interesting ones instead. If you’d rather not do that, consider making a second account for your portuguese personality and curate a separate circle of friends. Instagram and Twitter both let you log into two accounts at the same time and flip back and forth between them.
I’ve also changed twitter, but that doesn’t do much except teach you some stupid pretend words like “tweetar” (shouldn’t that be “pipiar”???). I daresay if you use Facebook you could get some mileage out of changing the language settings in that.
You can massively increase the amount of language in your life by tweaking the settings on your most-used websites. The obvious one for me is my Google Account settings, which affects all my search results, plus the menus in Google Chrome, names of folders etc in Gmail, spellcheck in Google Docs, names of days and months in Google Calendar and dozens of other things. You can change the settings of Windows itself if you have Windows 10 but it’s a bit harder on earlier versions.
Going a step further, try changing the language settings on Android or iOS. It’s quite a big step because from then on just about anything you do using it will require a lot more concentration, but if you’re up for it, it’s a great way of getting familiar with vocabulary related to gadgets. Make sure you remember the steps you take so you’ll know how to change them back if you find you’re in over your head.
Label Your House
I mentioned, a while ago, posting post-it notes all over my house with the names of things on them. That’s quite a clever way of bumping up your vocabulary a bit without really trying, although with hindsight I wish I’d written the words in larger letters with a big fat marker, as I find myself peering at the post-its instead of having the words thrust in my face. Most of them disappeared ages ago but I still have a label on my headphones and some of our less-used spice jars still have a yellowing tag on them saying “noz-moscada” or whatever.
*=This was just a joke in earlier versions of this post but it could easily have been literally true by the time this page got its second update, in Summer 2020.
I’ve used quite a lot of different study guides since I started to learn portuguese. The quality is pretty variable, so I thought it would be useful to put some reviews on here. I’ll include both standard paper books and audiobooks. I probably haven’t scratched the surface of what’s available so if you’ve got any recommendations (or warnings!), feel free to tell me about them in the comments.
Portugal: Lingua e Cultura (Tom Lathrop & Eduardo M Dias)
Format: One textbook, one exercise book, two audio cassettes . Level: Beginner
This one has a special place in my heart since it was the first one I ever got into, recommended by my first ever formal teacher. She used to use it with younger students. Its main attraction is that its look and feel are very much like familiar old school textbooks I used to use in school language lessons, like the much-missed Cours Illustré de Francais. It’s copiously illustrated and very informal. On the downside, it has a very slow pace. You might remember learning french and basically the entire first year was just in the present tense. Well, this book is the same. If you aren’t used to learning language and want to take it slow with plenty of explanation and plenty of time to learn vocabulary before worrying about grammar, this might be a good approach, but if you want to dive straight in and tackle the hard stuff within a few weeks, you might be a bit frustrated at the leisurely pace.
The biggest problem by far, if you want to buy this book, is that it’s out of print at the time of writing and as far as I know hasn’t been in print for over a decade so copies are scarce. The same authors have a brazilian portuguese book that’s still available on the publisher’s website and Amazon, but not this one. You can still snag a copy on second hand sites like Abe Books (search page here) but you should probably ask yourself questions like “Has the previous owner filled in the spaces in the exercise books?”, “Does the book price include the tapes?”, “Do I even own a tape recorder?” and of course “What’s a tape recorder, grandad?” Even if you get a copy, you might be annoyed by some aspects of it, such as all the sections on money listing escudos as the currency of portugal. The fact that there are two footballers on the cover and neither of them is Ronaldo is a giveaway too.
Portugues Actual 1-3 (Herminia Malcata, Marta Silva)
Format: Textbooks, each with two Audio CDs. Level: Basic – Advanced
This traffic-light of books is designed to hit all the key grammar structure required for the 6 exams – A1 to C2. They’re no-nonsense, focused exercises, which should address any grammatical gaps you might need to fix before the exam. OK, so, I haven’t used the A1/A2 version, but the B and C levels are very thorough.
Susana Morais is the creator of the Portuguese Lab Podcast and Academy and she’s written a few books aimed at portuguese learners: A Casa No Bosque and 10 Short Stories in Portuguese for intermediate learners (B2), A Baú das Coisas Perdidas for beginners (A2) and “A Cidadela Misteriosa” for real newbies (A1 – and it’s bilingual so this really is your entry level option!). They each come with an audio version read by the author and some questions at the end to test your comprehension. I have A Casa no Bosque and it’s good fun.
The links above go to the Kobo versions, which is what I’m using, since it allows me to listen to the audio and read all on one device, but you can get a printed version or several other ebook options via her website Storyglot.
Portuguese (Michel Thomas, Victoria Catmur)
I swear by Michel Thomas – or rather Virginia Catmur, who does his portuguese course. She really draws you into the lesson and covers a huge amount of ground in a short space of time so that you go from zero to complete sentences in just a few hours. This was the method that really “unstuck” me and got me on course to make real progress, so if you’re just starting out, give it a go and see how you get on. There are a couple of ways of getting it: if you’re a Spotify Premium member, you can find the complete course there as part of your subscription. Audible have 8 volumes in total:
or if you prefer to use CDs, Foyles has them and I’m sure other book shops do too. At the time of writing, these are the ones that are available, but there are some others marked as not currently in stock so if this sounds interesting it might be worth searching the site for other versions at other learning levels and other price-points.
You can download a free one-hour taster from the Michel Thomas website, and in fact you can buy the courses there too but they seem to be a little bit more expensive there than elsewhere.
Gramatica Aplicada (Carla Oliveira)
Format: Books only. Level: A1-C1
Like “Portuguese Atual”, these books are really systematic, hitting one topic per page, straight from the exam specification, with practice exercises on the facing page. The format of the book is larger than Português Atual, near A4, with illustrations so it feels a bit more friendly. So if that’s a factor for you, you might like these better. They are broken up in an odd way though. The first one goes from super-basic A1 level right through to the end of B1. The second covers the intermediate certificate and the first level of advanced.
These books aim to introduce words, terms and phrases used in business settings, computers and so on. They don’t really try and introduce the grammar, but you’ll find that the grammar is pitched at a level that supports your revision for the appropriate level. I don’t really think any of this vocabluary is going to be much help with an exam, so if that’s what you’re aiming for, I’d suggest looking elsewhere but iof course if you want to work in Portugal it’s probably going to be a big help.
A Actualidade em Português (Ana Tavares, Herminia Malcata)
Format: Textbook only with exercises inline. Level: Intermediate (B2)
This book uses moderately complex texts as the basis for some comprehension exercises. It doesn’t try and instruct the reader in grammar per se, but it brings in a lot of idiomatic phrases, highlights things like synonyms and antonyms, and other tricky aspects of the language. It’s quite challenging in places.
There is a lot of discussion of contemporary issues that will test your descriptive powers. It would be good for someone aiming at a B2 exam, and it’s well-suited to being the basis of a series of 1:1 lessons with a teacher who can help with some of the difficult bits and keep you on the straight-and-narrow with the spoken exercises!
I can’t find a source for this in the UK but you can buy it from Bertrand (Portugal)
Português Outra Vez
Format: Exercise book. Level: C1,2
This is an advanced exercise book. There are no explanations, just exercises, exercises, exercises. It has three sections
Idiomatic Expressions
Verbs with Prepositions
Vocabulary Expansion
To be honest, I found it a bit heavy-going. The exercises are all of the same form and it’s grueling doing one page after another of the same style of question. There really are so many idiomatic expressions it’s bewildering. I think I’d have appreciated them interespersing examples with exercises, and maybe cutting out some of the more outlandish ones, for example. Likewise, in section 2, you really have no option but to buy a copy of the guide to verbs with prepositions and plough through them, but are you really going to remember them? You need to have some sort of extension activity to give it context, like writing texts with them or something.
It’s worth doing, but it’s serious stuff this: it’s not to be taken lightly!
You can bag a copy from Bertrand . Foyles have a listing for it too but there’s no pictures so I’m not sure if it’s available.
Qual É A Dúvida?
Format: Exercise book. Level B1-C2
Like the previous one, this is non-stop exercises, but it has the virtue of at least varying the theme and it deals with common sticking points that you’re likely to use in day-to-day life.
I found it a really useful study aid in the run-up to the C1 exam. It covers a wide range of grammar issues from the intermediate and advanced spectrum, including some basic but stubborn queries like ser vs estar and perfect vs imperfect tenses, up through subjunctive voice, direct and indirect speech and on to some of the more esoteric C2 level uses for gerunds. The explanations are extremely sparse, so it definitely isn’t the book you want if you’re learning from scratch. It just tells you in the most basic terms, what rule you’re meant to be revising and then throws you into 20-30 questions, mainly filling in the blanks. It’s ideal for someone who has already encountered the grammar structures but isn’t confident in using them and wants some extra practice.
Foyles have a listing for it too but there’s no pictures so I’m not sure if it’s available.
BBC Discovering Portuguese
Format: Textbook with exercises, Cassette tapes. Level: Basic.
I got hold of a copy of this from the Oxfam Shop in Ealing and tried to teach myself to speak using it. I wouldn’t bother though. Even if you can find a copy second hand it’s a bit basic and a bit outdated. Also… Cassettes.
Exam Practice
The main exam practice book I’ve used is “Exames de Portgues CAPLE-UL” by José Lino Pascoal and Teresa Brandão Oliveira. You can get it online from Bertrand and download the audio files here by entering the ISBN number (9789897524622) and publisher (Lidel).
Bertrand also sell a book of B2 test papers with an accompanying CD from the same company called Exames de Portugues B2, Preparacao e Modelos which might be useful if you are looking at intermediate level, but bear in mind that it covers several different flavours of B2 level test including DIPLE Escolar, which is the test given to school-age children, Celpe-Bras, the brazilian equivalent of DIPLE and half a dozen others I don’t even recognise. It’s not specific to the standard CAPLE test framework, in other words, so although it is quite chunky, it may not be as useful as it seems.
Português em Foco 1-4
This series of books comes in a variety of flavours: student textbooks (with some exercises) full exercise books and versions for teachers. They come with free audio content too. They are divided by topic rather than by grammatical feature, so Book four, for example, does cultural aspects, the work of Fernando Pessoa
You can find them here (in Portugal) and Foyles have a few in the UK too (this one, for example – sorry, I can’t be bothered linking to every one directly and it doesn’t have an author page like Wook does!
The really interesting one, though, is the interactive version available from Blinklearning (Books 1, 2, 3, 4). Unfortunately, I haven’t had a good experience with the one I tried. I have updated this section a few times as I’ve gone along, but I guess the best thing is, if you want to try these, have a look at my previous blog posts and see if it’s still something you want to try. The long and the short of it is, I would recommend the book but definitely not the ebook!
Reference Books
Aside from the study materials, I also use Essential Portuguese Grammar from Amelia Hutchinson and Janet Lloyd, which is pretty thorough. You couldn’t sit down and learn it all from cover to cover (believe me I tried!) but it’s good for an occasional check. I had a look around the internet and was surprised to see it selling for over a hundred quid in a lot of places. Bertrand is the only shop that seem to have it for anything like a sensible price.
I’m not going to talk about the two vocabulary audiobooks I’ve tried. Absolute waste of time. Nobody can learn a language by memorising lists of vocabulary read out in a monotonous voice. You need the context or it’ll never stick.
God, now that I’ve finished this page, I am horrified at how many books I’ve used for so little effect due to my ever-advancing senility. Oh well, never mind – my brain may be addled by old age, crosswords and gin but I’m not doing too badly, I think!
More jottings from Ciberdúvidas, this time relating to the difference between “se não” and “senão”.
Senão (just one word) can be:
A noun meaning “drawback” or “defect” – the example given in the article, “Não há bela sem senão” menas “there’s no beauty without a drawback” or if you’re feeling poetic, “every rose has it’s thorn”
As a linking element meaning one of several things in english, which all have the common theme of expressing an alternative case:
“or else” – Fala mais alto senão não te oiço means “Speak up, or else I won’t hear you”
“but (on the contrary)” – Não dá quem tem, senão quem quer bem means “It isn’t those who have that give but to those who really want to”
“if not” – O que é a vida senão uma luta? means “What is life if not a struggle? [NB – it only means “if not” in this kind of context though – where it’s essentially doing the same job as “except” – contrast with the meaning of “se não” below]
“except” Ninguém falou senão o meu irmão means “Nobody spoke except my brother
Paired with another “nao”, this alternative case can morph into “only” or “nothing but”. For example Ele não tinha senão uma atitude a tomar: proteger a mãe.” means “He has nothingbut this one attitude: to protect his mother”
Paired with “Quando” it means “suddenly”. Eu estava quase na escola senão quando um carro atropelou um aluno means “I was almost at school when suddenly a car knocked over a student
Se Não (two words) is a lot less awkward. It means what it looks like it means: “If not” in most contexts we would normally use them. For example the Primo Levi book called “If Not Now, When” in english is called “Se Não Agora, Quando?” in Portuguese.
Some more examples:
Se não fosse um homem, gostaria de ser um sapo” – If I weren’t a man, I’d like to be a frog”
“Tenho cem livros de PG Wodehouse se não mais.” I have a hundred books by PG Wodehouse, if not more
This second one is the sort of situation I would make a mistake in since it looks like one of the examples for senão, but it’s subtly different.
The article gives this helpful tip: Uma regra simples para se verificar esta situação: neste caso é possível introduzir a expressão “é que” entre o “se” e o “não”. So…
Tenho sem livros de PG Wodehouse seé quenãotinha mais.
According to the rule, that should break in cases where we would want to use senão:
Fala mais alto seé que não [???] não te oiço
Não dá quem tem, se é que não [dá] quem quer bem
O que é a vida se é quenãoé uma luta?
Hm… I’m not sure. The first and second are definitely wrong, but the third means. “What is life if it is not a struggle”. Has that broken the sentence…? Not completely. It’s subtly different, but… Bit shady, that one.
“Se não” occasionally comes up in an even more separate way where you have a negative statement with a reflexive, passive or pronomial verb (cf this post)
Quem se não sente de agravos, não é honrado.
Here the verb is “sentir-se” but the se has gone ahead of everything else. Seems like a tedious and annoying way of writing a sentence to me, but hi ho.
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”]
So today was the big day. I turned up just before nine at the embassy and met a Spanish woman on the doorstep who was there for the same reason I was, so unlike last time I wasn’t going to be on my own! We chatted for a while, quite fluently and well, albeit with our different accents until the invigilator came and showed us into the exam room. It was good to have company, although a espanhola realised early on that we had sat down in random places and had the wrong exam papers with the wrong candidate numbers. If she hadn’t seen that, I would have had her mark and she mine. Having heard her speak, I think I would have had the best of that deal. She was very good. Well, she spoke Spanish already, and that’s like Portuguese but easier and without the Saudade, so she was already half way there.
Part 1
The first part of the exam was straightforward written comprehension. I was a bit low on time and I could see that the last set of questions were written answers (filling in missing words) so I jumped ahead to there because I thought if I ran out of time and had to guess the last few answers it would be a lot easier with multiple choice answers than having to pull words out of the air. In the end, no guessing was needed, but the last few answers were pretty rushed. I feel like I got a pretty decent mark in spite of some pretty tricky double-negatives and a lot of ambiguity to catch the unwary.
Part 2
Next up should have been the written section but they gave us compreensão de Oral instead. This was by far my worst subject last time but I had better strategy this time. I could see that the first 5 questions allowed an extra minute to read the answers but the last two didn’t, so I used the time before the start to read those last two and make little text notes so that I wouldn’t be overwhelmed when they came around. I don’t think I got them all right, but it wasn’t a rout like it was in the B1 exam, either.
Part 3
Then came the written section, which consisted of a letter to an airline company who had lost my bags, damn their eyes. I gave them a good ticking off I can tell you! Levaram nas orelhas! Then there was a short essay question about current affairs with a choice of three subjects. I chose traffic congestion because it’s a pet topic of mine and I have ranted about it more than once in text and in spoken Portuguese. The final question was a short exercise in rewriting sentences in different forms, changing from indicative to subjunctive and passive to active and so on. Some were so easy I worried I might have been missing something but I think I did OK.
Part 4
And so we come to the last section – the dreaded Produção Oral. In this section, having a second person in the room with me was both a blessing and a curse. It was a curse because there were now twice as many people looking expectantly at me while I was talking, which made me nervous and unsettled, but on the “blessing” side of the ledger, the examiner alternated between us, so that we had time to marshall our thoughts and could even get an idea of what we were going to be asked next. I must admit, I forgot a lot of what I had told myself during the first stages of the presentation. I didn’t speak slowly, I blurted. And I skipped past some of my prepared set-pieces in favour of short, easy routes to the end of a question. Very bad. At one point, I started describing my holiday in Lisboa and realised in mid-sentence that I’d forgotten the name of the Torre De Belém. An awkward moment (it felt like about three weeks) passed before I finally unstuck my palsied brain. Apart from that though, it wasn’t a total disaster. I didn’t dry up completely the way I have in a couple of lessons. It was bad but could have been worse. Oh and I also noticed I kept flapping my hands about and knocking the table, including a couple of times with my wedding ring. This wouldn’t have been so bad but the recording device was sitting on the table so I expect it’ll sound like there are shots being fired when someone gets around to listening. Peço imenso desculpe senhor(a)!
Then we moved onto a dialogue between the two of us on the subject of emigration. We had had a few minutes to prepare and we agreed a protocol whereby we would finish by asking “concordes?”. We didn’t stick to it very closely in the heat of the moment but it seems like a good idea because it prevented any accidental interruptions that might break the other person’s concentration. I feel like I did pretty well in this section. I spoke fluently in the introduction, spoke a little bit about my wife’s reasons for coming to the UK and about refugees who have no choice but to leave the country. We ran out of conversation with still about three minutes left and there was an awkward moment in which all three of us were looking around wondering what to say next. Now, if I had been an amiable guffin in a Wodehouse comedy, I would have proposed marriage to one of them just to fill the gap in conversation, but fortunately for all concerned I… Oh God, I did something even worse… I mentioned Brexit.
Minefield anyone?
It went pretty well though. I just mentioned that there had been a debate around free movement and that the results would cause many problems for people like us who lived abroad or (in my case) had married someone from sunnier climes. That filled the conversation nicely and I was able to get in a crack about not speaking to a family member who had voted for this bollocks. TBH we are still on speaking terms so it was a lie, but it got a laugh and I think that helps!
Conclusão
So did I pass? Well, to be honest I’m not sure, and I don’t suppose they’ll tell me anytime soon of last time is anything to go by! Last time I did well in two sections and so-so in the other two. This time I think I did well in three and pretty badly in one. I hope that averaging it all out, I’ll get by but if I fail I won’t be very surprised.
I’m already thinking ahead to the C1 (advanced) exam a year from now, and if I have to re-sit the B2 in May it will be a pain in the bum but not the end of the world. I’m still a bit disconcerted at how slowly I am acquiring new words and skills in spite of huge amounts of study, but I think that’s just the effect of 47 years of neglect and booze on my poor old brain so probably can’t be helped. The C1 exam seems to be longer and more tightly controlled. For example, the conversation portion of the exam isn’t just recorded in audio but filmed all the way through. Scary! Well, we’ll see.
I’m really looking forward to reading some books in English now. My TBR pile is groaning with gorgeous unread novels, so I’ll relax a little but for a while but I can’t afford to take a few weeks off like last time. I’ve got the wheelie up and I need to just keep riding my bike around the playground.
Ser and Estar are two little words that cause a lot of people a lot of pain because they both mean “to be” but they’re used in different situations. Usually they’re pretty straightforward but there are some weird hinterland cases I often struggle with so I am going to use this page to list some of them. I’ll add to it as they crop up.
Backing up a bit for the benefit of any newbies who are reading this (srsly dudes, you’re in the wrong place)
Ser
Ser comes from “Esse” in Latin and it’s cognate with the english word “Essence”. You use it when you are talking about some essential qualities a thing or a person has that are permanent and unchanging
He is tall
You are intelligent
I am the Walrus
It is made of wood
Are all examples of phrases that tell you something about someone’s or something’s essential nature so they all take “ser” in Portuguese
Estar
Estar is from the latin “stare” and it’s cognate with “status” so you use it when you’re talking about a situation that a person or thing is in now.
He is in the bathroom
He is ill
It is on fire
Are all examples of phrases that tell you something about what state something is in at a fixed point in time, so they all take “estar” in portuguese.
Ficar
There’s a third word “ficar” which actually means “to remain” but it can also be use for geographical sentences
Lisbon is in Portugal
The shop is in Kingston
In each of these the portuguese would use Ficar because the geography is fixed and it ain’t moving.
You can also come across it in some other situations like “ficou feliz quando leu a carta”, which can be confusing since it looks like we’re using the “geographical is” to describe a very transitory emotion. Here, the person isn’t saying “he was happy” but “he became happy”.
Don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules.
So What Are the Weird Situations?
So far, so easy, but when you start to think about these things it starts to get a bit perplexing though. Here are some conundrums and the suggested solutions
Weather
“It’s a beautiful day”
Ser or Estar?
Well the weather changes, so that sounds like Estar. Ah, but today is today. The weather might change tomorrow but tomorrow is tomorrow. Today is beautiful. It was always destined to be beautiful. And when I look back on the selfies I took today I will remember how beautiful it was, from start to finish.
To cut a long story short, you’re basically safest using “estar” for anything weather-related. I have seen “é um dia muito bonito”, so the ser form isn’t completely crazy but estar seems to work in basically any situation, so I would suggest sticking to the idea that the weather is fleeting and slathering estar all over it.
The View Out the Window
Heraclitus said “You Can Never Step In the Same River Twice”. If you step into the Thames tomorrow, the water that was in it today will have flowed away and been replaced by new water. There’ll be new leaves, new ducks, new discarded coke cans. Every day, I thank the Lord that I don’t have the job of translating Heraclitus into Portuguese.
This past Tuesday, I was on the train and I wanted to describe the view. Is a view out the window a transitory phenomenon like Heraclitus would have said or a more permanent one like his pal Permenides might have said*? The hills and trees are as permanent as a thing can be, and the fact that the train is moving past doesn’t change them. Does that matter? I decided it was probably estar because the view from the window would sometimes be of the back of a Morrisons supermarket or a junkyard or a giant poster of Boris Johnson.
The view in question. Heraclitus asked me to make this an animated gif, but I’m with Parmenides on this one
So are all views from all windows always estar? No matter where the window is, the weather will change and so the view will change from day to day? Well, I raised this in a discussion and my good friend Márcio helped me (as he always does) to get my head around all this, confirming and clarifying what I was trying to think through. If you live in a house on a hill, one of the selling points of that house might be its view across a lake or a meadow. In that case, it would be fair to say that the view from the house was a beautiful view always and ever, despite fluctuations. That’s it’s defining characteristic, even when the fog is temporarily obscuring it.
A vista pela janela do comboio estava linda
A vista pela janela do meu apertamento no 23° andar era linda
Jobs
Sou profissional de informática. That’s what I’m trained for, and if I move from place to place, that’s what I’ll remain. Even if I get a job as a postman, temporarily, because I have found myself between contracts in December when the Christmas rush is on, I will still be a profissional de informática who happens to be delivering your graze box this morning.That seems fine for people who have chosen a career path, or who have had specialist training of some sort. But what about transitory jobs we do for a few weeks? What about jobs we do but feel no affinity for and don’t identify with; jobs, in other words, that just pay the rent?
Again, there’s no room for estar here. Estar is never (?) used to just make a simple link between two nouns; if it’s not paired with an adjective then “ser” is what you need., so if you wanted to say you were a postman you’d still say “Sou Carteiro”. Does this seem odd that you can be both a Profissional de Informática and at the same time um carteiro? Well, apparently not, although if you wanted to stress the temporary nature of the gig you could rephrase it by saying “I am working as a postman” instead of “I am a postman”, which, thinking about it, is probably what you’d do in English, too.
*= I happen to know Parmenides used Southeastern Rail and long hours of being completely stationary were a formative influence on his views on this matter.
Here in the UK, everyone’s nerves are shredded. It’s the 22nd of June, the day before the referendum. At this stage, nobody is going to change their mind and on Twitter, conversation quickly moves from disputing the veracity of a statistic to name-calling, blocking and general unpleasantness.
That being the case, I thought I would go further afield and look at some Portuguese reporting on the Brexit on the grounds that looking in from the outside might give some useful perspective. A few days ago, I blogged about the delightful description of Boris Johnson by Miguel Esteves Cardoso in a column in Público (cf “Learning from the Brexiteers“) but I have come across some other examples, too. As you would expect, it’s a mixture of fear for the future of the EU and the Western Alliance more broadly, versus a sort of mystified bafflement about why we are having this collective hissy-fit, and I’ve even seen a few saying “sod ’em” and describing the UK as “the Crying Child of Europe”. It’s a fair cop.
First of all, I was interested to see some views from Portuguese people living in Britain. Here’s one in the Jornal de Notícias, and another in Bom Dia Europa. The worry for existing residents is twofold. First of all, although it’s unlikely there would be mass deportations, nobody knows what post-brexit Britain will be like, so it’s not impossible, and with the mood getting as ugly as it is. I know my wife and some of her friends are already sensing a higher level of ambient resentment against them from people whose opinions are formed by the Daily Mail and Daily Express. Secondly, Portuguese people will have a higher level of hassle and inconvenience moving about,. Presumably it’ll be the same for Brits living in Spain who will be lose a lot of their current rights and entitlements. And we haven’t even got into things like VAT harmonisation and the nightmare small businesses will face dealing with paperwork, reclaiming money and on and on. Some of the interviewees are small business owners and there’s a level of concern about the unknown consequences as they see the remain campaign being forced onto the back foot by the giddy, unthinking optimism of the leave campaign for some ill-defined future. Some are considering leaving.
Next, let’s look at a blogger – César Agosto – who writes for Homo Causticus on WordPress. He has blogged a few times on the referendum and related matters such as the last general and mayoral elections. I don’t know anything about him but I guess he must live here, or visit often, or at least be a keen bifewatcher because his blogs draw on a knowledge of history and pop culture. In “As Propostas Por Favor” he rightly highlights the lack of a clear sense of what is to come after Brexit, and the problem that causes in trying to decide whether or not you want to support it. In Life on Mars he uses the TV show of the same name as a jumping-off point to illustrate differences between the seventies, when the first EEC referendum took place and the modern world, where we are now holding the second one on the European Union. The first is typified by the famous debate between Tony Benn (much-revered eccentric hero of the left) and Roy Jenkins (mainly remembered, I think, for his speech impediment). Each one is measured and forceful, defending their views (basically: economics vs democracy) without rancour (just as well… I don’t like to think what would happen if Roy Jenkins were to say “Rancour”).
What he could add, but kindly doesn’t, is that the second is typified by the sight of useless, workshy UKIP MEP Nigel Farage telling Herman Van Rompuy ” I don’t want to be rude but, really, you have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk”. And this is what our country has come to after forty years. Other modern figures get a mention too, and not just the usual suspects. Redwood gets a mention, and Cameron’s Eton demeanour is contrasted with Sadiq Khan, famously the son of a bus driver. Bizarrely, he is described as charismatic, although to me he seems to disappear into the background on any stage he’s on, even when he’s actually speaking, but hi ho.
In the news media, there is some sympathy for the idea that the EU is in need of a good kick in the arse. For example, José Pedro Teixeira Fernandes says “Long Live the European Union – and Down with the technocracy of Brussels and Frankfurt” while José Vítor Malheiros proclaims “The EU has turned Europe into a brothel” and argues that the brexit might just cause a welcome return of democracy to the region. Portugal, of course, has had its fair share of problems with the EU, and has more cause for complaint than our whining. With that in mind, Paulo Pisco calls the brexit vote “A national egoism” and defends the humanist spirit of the European project against the xenophobia and selfishness of one nation that seems to want to dominate it completely. Actually, Público is buzzing with columnists looking for an angle on the story, so you can take your pick, really.
Finally, there’s an article I can’t even read in its entirety because it has a paywall but I liked the first few lines. As you know, last week some deranged idiot, driven on by some misplaced sense of fighting against “traitors” shot and killed his local Member of Parliament, Jo Cox, near a constituency surgery. There was – and still is – a heated and rather nonconstructive debate about the extent to which the tone of the Leave Campaign’s rhetoric fed a climate of violence that led to the attack. In “I am Jo“, João Duque invokes the memory of “I am Charlie” to stand with her against violence and for European values. Paraphrasing the first three sentences:
If Jo Cox died because she believed the UK is important to the EU then I am Jo
If she believed that a more diverse Europe can be richer and more stable then I am Jo
If Jo Cox believed that democracy will allow wisdom to prevail then I am Jo
Ontem, fui ao “Soho Teatro” no centro de Londres para ver uma comédia chamada “What if there is no toilet?” (“E se não há casas-de-banho?”). É um espectáculo duma comediante australiana que se chama Felicity Ward. Eu sei, parece um tema muito estranho para uma comédia, mas foi muito engraçado, e muito agradável. A Felicity Ward falou da sua vida com Síndrome do Intestino Irritável e a ansiedade de estar longe duma casa-de-banho e precisar de fazer coco ou xixi. No começo do espectáculo,
pude ver no palco uma sanita em vez duma cadeira, e em cada lado do palco, havia uma pirâmide de papel higiénico. A meio do espectáculo, ela abriu a sanita, e fora dela tirou uma garrafa de água, e começou a beber! Mais tarde, quando contou uma história embaraçosa, produziu umas folhas do papel higiénico de dentro da sanita e fez um bigode de papel higiénico para ela mesmo. Se alguns membros da audiência quisessem sair das suas cadeiras para usar a casa-de-banho, ela pediu-lhes fazer um sinal “T” com as suas mãos para indicar as suas intenções. Por isso, eles vieram a ser membros do “Team Toilet” (em inglês, isto é talvez equivalente a “Equipe do Banheiro”)
O que a Felicity Ward acha da vida em Inglaterra? Não pode acreditar como é difícil de procurar uma casa-de-banho pública. “Em Kings Cross, custa 50p para usar a casa-de-banho, mas apercebi-me que há dois pianos, para os viajantes usarem gratuitamente. Fiz xixi num piano”.
Reflections
This was quite a tricky one when I wrote it on iTalki because at least one of the people who helped correct it had underestimated how icky it was. When I said she took toilet paper out of the toilet, I guess it seemed like I meant she put toilet paper into the toilet, which, on the face of it, seems more likely.
In fact, even the translation of “toilet” is a bit tricky. I originally went with “E se não há sanitas!?!?” for the title. Sanita is the actual bit you sit on – the throne, if you like, but I think the feeling was “Casa-De-Banho” (the room the toilet is in) was the salient point. The trouble is, “house of bath” sounds a bit off to me. I dunno. The translators of the Bible had similar problems. In 1 Samuel 24, David goes into a cave to “cover his feet” (squat down for reasons you can imagine, in a way that will make his robes drape down over his feet). Obviously this phrase means nothing to a modern speaker of english, so various translators of the various versions of the Bible such as “relieve himself”, “make water” or “go to the bathroom”. I love the idea that, in the desert, hundreds of years before Christ, he’s going into a cave, flicking a switch and finding an avocado-coloured bathroom suite, tiles and a bog-brush.
Another contentious word was “cocô” which is the way the Brazilians write “poo”. M’wife tells me it’s “coco” in Europe, although, confusingly that also means “coconut”. I assure you, she wasn’t worried about needing a coconut. Does the orthographic agreement cover poo, I wonder?
I left “Equipe do Banheiro” as it was, as a translation of “Team Toilet”, even though it’s more of a Brazilian way of saying it, The European version suggested was “Equipe da Casa-de-Banho”. The reasons for choosing the Brazilian were (1) it sounds more like a team name and closer to the rhythm of “Team Toilet” and (2) Felicity Ward is Australian so she speaks a hideous, barbarous travesty of English* so why not translate her words in a hideous, barbarous travesty of Portuguese**?
*=joking, obvs***
**=joking again, obvs****
***=I probably shouldn’t over-explain but you know I’ll get hate mail if I don’t lay it out for the benefit of humourless people in Canberra
If you’re clever enough to understand films made in Portuguese, that’s a great way to learn more but it’s pretty challenging. You’re not helped by the fact that the Portuguese film industry is not particularly strong compared to Brazil, even, let alone Hollywood. Some of the old classics are excellent (but beware modern remakes of classics like 
É um espectáculo duma comediante australiana que se chama Felicity Ward. Eu sei, parece um tema muito estranho para uma comédia, mas foi muito engraçado, e muito agradável. A Felicity Ward falou da sua vida com Síndrome do Intestino Irritável e a ansiedade de estar longe duma casa-de-banho e precisar de fazer coco ou xixi. No começo do espectáculo,
Luso 