I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this app before but I’ve been using it much more consistently this year. I added it to my daily to do list and I’ve stuck to that as a habit along with my other wake up games, Termo and Quina. 20 questions per day until I have it down cold. I am trying to boost my knowledge of flags, boost my geography and of course learn the portuguese spellings of these places. Of course you’ll only get the portuguese lesson if you go into the settings and set the game language to portuguese. Impressively, you can choose between Portuguese Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese.
My flag knowledge is pretty terrible, but iI think I’m a lot better at geography. I have my weak points though. There are lots of little republics in Europe that I know exist but don’t know how they fit together. I learned the map of Europe by doing a Jigsaw of European countries at primary school but… Well, a lot of those wooden shapes have been cut up into mush smaller pieces now! Central Asia is a bit of a blur, and most of the western part of Africa is a mystery too. I’m OK on the rest of Africa, or at least I thought I was, but I was a bit embarrassed to realise Swaziland had changed its name to Eswatini. I know Rwanda is a country and Kigali isn’t. Therese Coffey, take note!
Most of the spellings are pretty similar in portuguese, or they change in fairly predicatable ways. So for example, if you knew you wanted “Slovakia” but you didn’t know how to spell it in portuguese, you could make a fair guess: not many words begin with “S” followed by a consonant in portuguese, so it would probably have an E at the start (like “Espanha”).
Eslovakia.
Hm, well K isn’t very portuguese either so let’s lose that and put QU on its place.
Eslovaquia.
Close, but it wouldn’t be quite right either because it would be stressed on the penultimate syllable: eslovaQUIa. That would sound weird, so to make it right you’d need to whack an accent on the A.
Eslováquia. Boom!
Some are very different though. The most surprising one, for me, is Algeria which in portuguese is Argélia – the R and L swap places from one language to the other.
I’m really enjoying it. I grew up on Every Boy’s Handbook, before the Internet turned our brains to mush, and this sort of thing – flags and maps and all that boyscout stuff – seems like Proper Knowledge, and I’m glad there are apps that help me banish my ignorance. The fact that it’s building my Portuguese vocabulary is certainly a bonus.
Luso 