Oh! I must have accidentally unsubscribed to Say It In Portuguese’s email feed because I completely missed the notification about the last episode. I had been watching out for it because I’m in it, but I’ve just noticed it’s in my podcast app!
The podcast is definitely one you should be subscribed to if you are working toward B2 or over. It’s not the sort of thing you can listen to as a newbie, but if you already have decent skills, it gives you a wealth of knowledge about expressions and culture, all of which are essential for moving up to the next level. So, in other words, I can’t recommend it strongly enough! Cristina was my teacher for later C1 through to graduating C2, and she is very much a “friend of the blog”, but I would recommend SIIP even if that weren’t the case, because it’s excellent, it’s been around for ages and there’s nothing else like it, really.
Generally, the podcast picks an idiomatic expression and unpacks it for you, but in this one, we discuss the lyrics of a song, mainly trying to analyse the meaning of “Toninho” itself, but there are some expressions in the song too, and those are worth noticing. So if you don’t know the song already, I challenge thee: set aside some time to give the video and the podcast episode a listen and see how much you can learn in fifteen minutes.
My last exam result came out in early January last year, so I have been constantly checking and re-checking the page to see if the DUPLE results are out. I leave it open in my browser and then refresh it next time I have a spare minute.
I went to write this and I noticed the post count was at 1999. So here you go: this is my 2000th blog post!
It’s serendipitous timing, having such a milestone just after the exam, because the theme of the post is what to do next. I’ve just taken the most advanced test there is. Maybe I passed, maybe I didn’t, but either way, it raises the question: will there ever come a time when I cease to say “I am learning Portuguese” and start saying “I speak Portuguese”? And on a more practical level, does there ever come a time when I stop doing exercises, and thinking of at least some of my interaction with the language as “work”, and have it just be something that’s part of my life, like riding a bike or gardening.
And there’s a whole string of questions after that: If I stop actively learning, will I have forgotten everything within 6 months? What will I do with this blog then? Switch it to being a crypto hub?
I definitely don’t feel like I’m a finished product now, so I won’t be stopping yet. I’ve made huge progress in the last couple of months though and I’d like to keep it up. I was thinking I might just relax a bit, catch up on my engish reading, finish a couple of little projects, and play Fallout:London, before picking up the learning again in earnest, maybe in the new year.
I will definitely need a goal though. What goal? Not another exam. Well, not unless I find out I’ve fucked the last one up. I’ll set a goal maybe six months out, work towards that, and at the end of that time, just take myself out of learning mode, uninstall my apps, and just stick to enjoying the fruits of my labour by reading all the Portuguese books I’ve hoarded over the years.
Well, that’s the beginnings of a plan. I’ll see how I feel about it over the next few days and weeks.
So this is it, the final boss of Portuguese language exams: The Diploma Universitário de Português Língua Estrangeira (DUPLE) which is the highest level (known as “C2”) of the Portuguese proficiency testing system. Like all the earlier exams, it has the usual four parts: reading comprehension, written communication, aural comprehension and verbal interaction, but they’re all longer than the previous exams, so the lunch break comes after the first two sections, then there are two more, and you finish after 3PM.
Last-minute exam prep didn’t go as planned. I didn’t get through everything I intended to cram in on Tuesday evening. I tried to get to bed early but between the endless faffing and the fact that my nose was blocked, I didn’t sleep well, missed my alarm and didn’t get up till 7, by which time I hadn’t had more than about 4 hours of sleep. Oh well, never mind, at least when I finally woke up, my nose was unblocked so I didn’t have to struggle through the exam sniffing and wheezing.
Me leaving the house.
The exam took place at the Portuguese embassy near Green Park. When I got there, I was surprised to find I was one of four candidates! Three is the most I’d had before and I assumed at this level there wouldn’t be many people wanting to take the test, but obviously I was wrong! Before we started, they checked our ID and made us sign a piece of paper. One of the names on the list was very, very Portuguese, which piqued my curiosity. I spoke to him later, in one of the breaks, and he said he was from Madeira but had been in the UK since he was about 8, so he needed to refresh his language skills. Then there was a fellow northerner, but a proper one who still lives up there and had come down from York for the exam. Like me, he’s married to a Tuga who refuses to speak Portuguese with him. Why are you so mean to us, Portuguese ladies? The fourth member of our crew said he’d done C2 Spanish a few years ago and, having done the boring iberian language, decided to level up his language-learning experience by doing the whole thing again but on hard mode.
Four guys, four pencils. OK, let’s see how much of the exam I can remember…
Compreensão de Leitura
Let’s see… There was a text about feeling envy for the lifestyle and the bling of richer people in different social classes. After the exam, I searched online faor some key phrases and it’s this if you’re interested. The text is easy to follow but the questions were phrased very ambiguously and there were usually multiple answers that seemed right to me, so I just followed my instinct where I needed to.
Next up… Oh my god, I was so happy! There was text by Mario de Carvalho! I just finished reading a book by him a few weeks ago so I was quite tuned in to his writing style and sense of humour, which helped a lot. Better yet, he was writing about vocabulary, so he had deliberately filled the text with interesting and unusual words, many of which were new to me, but one of them was “obnubilação” and I chortled because that’s the noun form of this word, which I noticed while I was reading the book and turned into a mini-blog! I felt like the gods of language-learning were smiling on me. I can’t find the text online unfortunately; it must be in one of the books, I suppose. I’d like to read it.
Then there was a short story by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen about someone called Monica. It came across like she was talking about an Instagram influencer, but it was written long before social media. When I went searching for it, I found a lot of people talking about it fondly. There are a few copies of it dotted about online but only in very unexpected places. Here for example.
The most annoying part of this section of the exam is the one with the paragraphs removed from a text. There is usually one spare paragraph that you have to ignore but they had made it even worse in the C2 by adding two extras. The text was something to do with pet turtles being released in Lisbon parks, setting in train a series of events culminating in some ducks being eaten by falcons. Oh lord. It was awful. I swear they could go in almost any order. After a while, I gave up, put in some random guesses and decided to come back to it.
C2 has an extra kind of question that doesn’t exist at other levels: they give you a text that has some extra words hidden in it and you have to identify the words that aren’t needed. I had done one of these on Tuesday and I was glad I had because it helped me understand that I’d been including words that could be removed rather than focusing on words that absolutely hadto be removed. I’m pretty sure I got most of the marks there.
Luckily I had quite a lot of spare time when I’d finished the remaining missing word rounds, so I went back to the bloody turtles and I think made a decent job of it.
I’m a content creator now.
Produção e Interação Escritas
As usual, the challenge here is to cram 250 words into a space that is only really big enough for 150, and still have the result be legible. The first activity was a formal letter to the British activist Les Knight, whose cause is making humans extinct in order to save the planet. Given that we are both British, I’m not even sure why I would be writing this in Portuguese, but I suppose it would make no difference anyway since people who start organisations aimed at human extinction tend not to be very open to rational argument, whatever language you use. I had a go, but my heart wasn’t in it.
The second section had three options: AI, social networks and the changing nature of the traditional family. I opted for the third one since it seemed least likely to lead me into a rat’s nest of filthy, dirty nuance. I described how the nuclear family had come about and the critique that came out of feminism. The trickiest part was talking about how it might change in the future. You can only do that if you point to some faults in how things work now. And since exam markers have families, you run the risk of offending someone. So, I tried to keep it at arms length by prefacing it with “some critics have pointed out…” and making sure to only talk about what dads could be doing differently. Nobody ever lost points for criticising men, so I think I’m on solid ground there.
The last part of this section was the usual ten sentences that need to be rewritten. Quite a hard one, I thought.
Finished with 20 minutes spare, so I went through the essays. Twice in one case. Found a lot of errors and fixed them carefully.
Lunch
I grabbed a sammidge from Waitrose and got chatting with two of the other candidates. I’m an introvert so I wouldn’t usually choose to spend time with colleagues; I usually like to spend the lunch break reading out loud to keep myself in the zone, but I hung out with them and we ended up speaking English. See, this is why having friends is bad.
Lovely fellas, though, both of them. They both said they were struggling a bit, especially with the Breyner Andresen story, but that’s OK, none of us have a citizenship application riding on this, so although it would be good to pass, it’s not the end of the world if we don’t: it’s been a great incentive to learn.
Lunch over, we went back to wait at the door. We met a woman who was there to take the B1 test in the afternoon. It was her first time. Another one learning a language to impress a Portuguese wife. That movie “Love Actually” has a lot to answer for.
They put us in a different room, with terrible acoustics, for the afternoon session. Great.
Compreensão Oral
This was by far the least stressed I have ever been in a Compreensão Oral test. It’s usually the part of the exam when I start sweating and blindly guessing answers, but today I felt in control, and calm.
There was a clip from a podcast called Palavras Cruzadas, featuring a crazy astrology lady. This episode.
There was a fragment of an interview with José Eduardo Agualusa about his short story collection O Livro dos Camaleões, which was very hard to follow. The recording wasn’t great, his accent is a little different, and in that room it all sounded very muddy and hard to understand. I got most of it, I think, but this was definitely the hardest one.
Then there was a piece about AIs being asked to predict whether AIs would be better at governing human society than humans are. Fuck off, Robots. Oh wait, I just remembered who the president of the USA is again. Wait, come back, robots. Please, save us, shiny metal overlords! And then there was an interview with a priest talking about the best way to console people who are grieving. That was weird because the answers to the questions were all in the first few minutes of the recording and then it ran on and on for 3 or 4 minutes with us listening to see if we’d missed anything, but there was nothing. I don’t know why they did that. Couldn’t they have just cut it off?
And… I can’t remember what the fifth recording was.
Produção e Interação Orais
We were paired up by the examiners and filmed in a small room, interacting with each other. They asked us both a few personal questions such as what was our name, where were we from and what was the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, that sort of thing. I mentioned in a previous blog that the invigilators are really helpful, and kind to the terrified candidates in the oral test: there was a good example today. The guy I was with looked blank when he was asked about his use of “dispositivos” and seemed to have momentarily forgotten what the word meant, or misheard it or something, so the Professora who was working the camera held her phone up and jiggled it as a hint, and that got him back on track.
Then we moved on to discussing images. I got a picture of an amphitheatre. It was a big one and very well preserved. I guess it was the coliseum in Rome but I’ve never been there and it seemed weird to ask about Italy in a Portuguese exam. Is there one that big in Portugal? I have to admit I’ve never heard of it. Anyway, rather than commit, I said that there would have been structures like this in a lot of places because the roman empire spread over the whole of Europe and parts of Asia and Africa and went on to talk about the influence of Latin on the languages of Europe, most obviously the romance languages but also in English and even in celtic Fringe languages, where you wouldn’t expect it. It was a good speech and I felt really pleased when I stuck the landing. Unfortunately I’d spoken much to quickly, so the camera lady made a sort of rolling hand gesture to indicate I should carry on to fill the remaining time. Shit, I’d already done everything I’d planned. Sudden mental gear change. Luckily, I was in pretty good form so after a couple of seconds of awkwardness I got straight back into talking about how they were making a sequel to gladiator and how the original actually had some real historical figures and… Yes, it was a bit of a lame follow-up, but I think they could see I was capable of talking well and hopefully they’ll make allowances for nervous ad-libbing.
The smart move, of course, would have been to talk about património monumental. That’s a big theme in the cultural part of the test spec. Unfortunately I just didn’t have the vocabulary at the tip of my tongue, so I didn’t dare lock myself in to 4 minutes of that.
Finally, we did a dialogue where we were given an outline of a script: you’re members of the same family and you have inherited a piece of land. There are 7 possible things you can do with it, and here are the stages you have to go through in the discussion.
The other chap was supposed to get the ball rolling, so he started saying we should just sell the thing because it was a hassle to look after it. I came back with a suggestion that it would be good to help plant more trees after the fires had destroyed so many, so maybe we should plant sobreiros and start a cork business. Horrible two seconds where I couldn’t remember the word “cortiça” but I recovered. He then said nah, too much work, let’s just sell it and go off to the beach to drink beer. I said that sounded good, but I still wasn’t on board, so instead suggested we try and rent the land to a solar panel company. That way we meet both our objectives, avoiding work while simultaneously helping save the planet with green energy (debatable, but never mind). It was a great dialogue. Unfortunately I made a slightly lame ending, saying “Então, estamos em… concordância”. What? Who talks like that? Oh well, never mind, it still went well, I thought.
My dialogue partner spoke really well: slower than me (good strategy) and with a good accent, nice nasalisation, and I’m sure he got a good mark.
Aaanyway, that was that. Said our goodbyes and I went off for a wander before hopping on the train. I stopped at a posh cafe and ordered a coffee and a macaroon. A Portuguese couple sat next to me and I felt weirdly like I wanted to order in Portuguese, which would have confused the waiter. In the end, I confused them even more by forgetting to pay! I had to email them and say sorry, send me the bill. I don’t know why I bothered because they’re right opposite Harrods and they probably make a fortune selling millefeuille to Saudi royals, but you’ve got to do the right thing, so I did.
One of two things I’ve stolen today, but we were allowed to take these so my conscience is clear.
There’s no point messing with perfection, so I’ve updated the presentation from C1 but not really altered it much.
O meu nome é Colin. Tenho 55 anos. Sou escocês por nascimento mas quase sempre morei em Inglaterra. Estou casado com uma madeirense e temos uma filha com dezanove anos que é escritora. Sou consultor de informática. Gosto de correr. Não sou muito desportivo mas cheguei a uma idade na qual fiquei com uma escolha: ou correria para perder peso ou correria risco de infarto e outros problemas de saúde. A corrida é um desporto solitário e não sou fã de desportos da equipa, portanto a seleção da atividade foi fácil. Adoro correr logo de madrugada quando há pouca gente no parque, apenas veados, coelhos, pássaros e outros homens gordinhos de meia idade. Consigo pensar, ouvir um audiolivro, e ver o sol nas copas das árvores. Treino forte e feio para aumentar o meu desempenho, mas é difícil porque como bolos a mais. Em Outubro, participei na Maratona de Lisboa. Não batei nenhum recorde, mas foi um dia incrível.
Comecei a aprender português a sério em 2016, mas já tinha feito algumas tentativas esporádicas anteriormente. Embora a minha esposa fale inglês fluentemente, a sua tia não falava e eu queria comunicar com ela.
Pedi dupla cidadania em 2019, mas houve um problema por causa da minha residência outrora nos Estados Unidos e o processo foi por água abaixo durante a época da pandemia. Fiz um segundo pedido mais recentemente e estou à espera da resposta. Não gosto de voar e por isso, fui a Portugal poucas vezes, mas visitei Lisboa, Cascais, o Porto, Coimbra, o Algarve e a Madeira que é, sem dúvida o meu lugar favorito, e não só porque a minha mulher vivia lá!
Sendo um pouco introvertido, falo pouco com outras pessoas mas gosto de ler, e isso, para mim, é o meu principal contacto com a língua portuguesa: leio muito. Há uma citação de Fernando Pessoa que diz “A minha pátria é a língua portuguesa”. Identifico-me com este sentimento, porque estou a pedir dupla cidadania mas acho que passo mais tempo a ler livros portugueses do que passei no país. É uma situação invulgar.
Às vezes, quando comecei, custava-me muito ler livros como “Bichos” de Miguel Torga (que tem muito vocabulário desconhecido que tem a ver com a vida bucólica), “A Costa dos Murmúrios” de Lídia Jorge (cujo estilo é um pouco denso) ou os livros do João Reis, que é um autor moderno e muito simpático (falamos no Instagram de vez em quando), mas achei o seu humor difícil de entender. Mas fui melhorando pouco a pouco e, nos dias que correm, é raro perder o fio à meada. Até me apetece voltar a ler alguns livros que li há anos e mal entendi. Leio qualquer espécie de livro: adoro os livros de Ricardo Araújo Pereira, de Miguel Esteves Cardoso, de João Tordo, e de Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida mas também leio não-ficção: uma Biografia do Marquês de Pombal, a Brevíssima História de Portugal e vários ensaios sobre a língua, a história e a cultura do país. Também li um livro sobre a corrida, escrito pela atleta portuguesa Jéssica Augusto.
Sou membro da Sociedade Anglo-Portuguesa, a qual tem os seus encontros ali no outro lado da rua. É um bom método para ficar a par de aspetos da cultura, mas convém lembrar que existem muitas maneiras de nos encontrarmos com a cultura portuguesa em Londres: concertos de Fado, restaurantes, exibições de arte, como a de Paula Rego que decorreu no Tate há um ano, e até existem comediantes portugueses que montam espetáculos em Londres, porque como há tugas suficientes aqui eles encontram público disposto a ouvir comédia no seu próprio idioma.
Em resumo, pretendo viver uma vida interna que é meio portuguesa, mesmo que não fale muito.
It’s been a busy weekend. I’ve had some work I needed to do and it’s distracted me from study but I’ve had quite a bit of lazy listening time, a little reading and worked through one of the Modelos. That’s 3 of the 5 done now. I definitely want to do the last one because it’s the real CAPLE one but I might be more selective with the other. I still haven’t done the Amor de Perdição Scuba Diving exercise and I’ve decided I’m not gonna. I’ve also only done one of the three batches of old fill-in-the-blank exercises I wanted to do this week. I’d still like to have a whack at those because they account for quite a big chunk of the compreensão da leitura exam as well as just generally boosting my competence.
I’ve got the house to myself though because Mrs Luso is in Madeira getting her passport renewed. I would have liked to go with her, but I’ve already blown my budget on Lisbon. Anyway, tough luck, no bolo do caco for me.
Well, while I’m weeping into my porridge, if I can be strategic about switching between work and revision I can really focus and get stuff done.
Planning this fairly ambitious pile of stuff:
Monday
Practice my apresentação 20 minutes
Watch last half of Gatos, practice, do copycat exercise on some of her dialogue (definitely not his!)
Modelo 4 compreensão do Oral
Half hour “scratching”
1 hour fill-in-the-blanks, probably using some of the material from Modelo 4 and maybe some of Portuguese Outra Vez if I still have time.
1 hour writing. Why not do one of the written production exercises? Because I want to hit some of my list of words and phrases to practice, so I’m going to pick a subject that gives me some elbow room to do that.
Total 4.5 hours work
Tuesday
Early Doors Produção & Interação Escrita
9AM lesson, verbal interaction
Lunchtime, Compreensão Oral
Afternoon, Compreensão da Leitura
Half hour “scratching”
Total 5.5 hours work. Annoyingly I have a residents association meeting in the evening. Terrible timing, but it’s quite an important one because we’ve got a council rep turning up to help us deal with the HA. I’ll go, but I’ll tell them one hour cut off and then I’m bouncing no matter what is happening.
Ugh, this is stressful. I might need some downtime in Thursday and Friday.
This is a Produção e Interação Escrita essay for a DUPLE exam. I’m retyping it with fixes to help me remember them. I did a letter too, but I’m not retyping that because I decided what I’d actually said in it was brainless.
By the way, something else I’m noticing with these: maybe it’s better to avoid subjects you care about. I find it tempting to write about things I have strong opinions about, because I feel like I’ve thought them through already. The trouble is, when I do that, I want the essay to be fair and accurate and the effort to do that channels my brainpower away from my efforts to write grammatical sentences. Maybe it’s better to pick boring topics where I can write something bland, not offend anyone and just express my milquetoast opinions on beautifully accurate Portuguese. I think I’ve done that in this case in another modelo, I wrote one about social media influence on elections. Just a few days after Trump, I think that was probably a mistake.
OK, here we go. The topic is whether the tourism industry is bad for a region.
É verdade que a indústria do turismo tem custos significativos, mas também há benefícios. Enquanto alguns lugares dinamizam a sua economia por minando carvão ou urânio, o turismo fornece uma oportunidade para gerar vastos lucros sem perigo de morte, sem poluição do lençol freático e sem fumo, ruído ou vibração. Basicamente a cidade, a zona ou o país está a ser pago só por existir e por ser o que é. É perfeito, não é?
Até certo ponto.
Infelizmente, nesta indústria, o produto é a cultura e as matérias* primas são os cidadãos e o espaço onde vivem. Em breve a cidade torna-se um parque de receios; restaurantes têm ementas em 5 línguas, casas de fados abrem as portas exclusivamente aos estrangeiros que não se importam de pagar cinco vezes mais do que os locais, e os apartamentos tornam-se quartos do “Air B&B” enquanto aumenta o número de sem-abrigos**.
O desafio para as câmaras municipais é exigente: como usar os lucros que os turistas trazem (em forma de impostos nas empresas no sector turístico) para construir novas casas, estabelecer novas infraestruturas*** e impedir que a cidade perda a sua personalidade.
Isto não é apenas uma estratégia defensiva. Também se trata de “sustentabilidade”, porque se a cidade perder os seus aspectos únicos, deixará de ser fixe**** e perderá os turistas também.
*I’m pretty sure it isn’t the first time I’ve done this but I used “materiais” as if “material” was the noun and not an adjective.
***Spelling challenge for English speakers: spell this word without forgetting the e. Difficulty rating: a million.
**Sem-abrigos = “the homeless”, but if you want to go for people it’s “pessoas sem-abrigo” , not “pessoas sem abrigos”. O suppose I was fooled because in English homeless is an adjective so I was trying to make it agree with pessoas. And that’s obviously stupid, because pessoas is femimine, so it would have to be “sem-abrigas” wouldn’t it, and that’s not going to fly at all!
****In a way, this is the right word, and I chose it because I had Lisbon in mind and Lisbon keeps getting voted as the coolest city in Europe, but it’s also a very informal word and I probably should have given it a bit more context otherwise it would probably seem quite jarring in an exam situation.
C’um caraças, que dia. Hoje de manhã, ouvi as notícias sobre aquele filho de puta cor de laranja e agora alguém está a falar espanhol na sala de estar enquanto estou a escrever português. Pois, uma destas coisas é pior do que a outra, mas ainda assim… Graças a Deus pela bênção de auscultadores. 🎧
Ora bem, volto à carga. Nem sequer pausei o temporizador. Esta não é uma estratégia eficaz para fazer um exame.
Luso 