I’ve had to rethink my approach to learning, since I’ve got right out of my routine since the holiday in France. I’m not really writing regularly and all the habits I’d got into – tweeting in Portuguese, reading daily, watching films weekly, doing exercises – have fallen into disrepair. So I’ve set myself a more modest goal: back to the writing and do something else daily, but not feel like I have to do everything. Hopefully if I can get back into the groove of doing a daily task, I can ramp it up again. I’ve got all my study materials together and put them in a box next to the sofa so that I don’t have to get over the hurdle of finding them (thus removing a barrier to my motivation!) I’ll probably post less on here too.
I’ve just had a meeting with a Portuguese teacher who I thought was doing something interesting. Her name is Catarina and she runs The Language Unschool.
If you hang around the various online forums where Portuguese learners congregate, you’ve probably come across a lot of teachers looking for new students among the pool of curious, interested, potential learners who are trying to figure out where to start. The teachers usually have YouTube channels with a range of topics new learners are interested in: how to watch subtitled TV, how to use Ser and Estar, how to say the days of the week and so on, and they use that to draw in paying punters.
Catarina was fishing in darker waters though. She contacted me via Reddit after I’d already been writing in WritestreakPT every day for a few weeks and invited me for a free consultation. I liked the sound of the school. The package has a few components: a smartphone app, grammar videos, group sessions activities that aim to draw out people’s Portuguese voice and getting them talking. She seemed very switched on and presented the options well.
She’d really made an effort to demonstrate her personal touch too, because she’d looked at some of my recent posts, where I’ve talked about my January yoga binge and she’d actually teamed up with a local yoga teacher and made a video about yoga in Portuguese, released on the day she contacted me 👇
As a piece of entrepreneurship, it was impressive. I felt like she was making an effort to win me over as a customer: where most teachers aim for broad appeal, she seemed to be aiming for a specific niche. That’s how it felt anyway: the approach, the description, even the pricing structure, all seemed to be tailored to suit people who had already made up their mind to stick at it long term.
Anyway, I tried out the yoga video yesterday morning . I had to turn the subtitles on because I couldn’t hear very well but the inbuilt YouTube subtitles have a black background. That created some unexpected humour, because at one point the teacher got down on the floor and… And then I couldn’t see her any more! It looked like she’d had a sudden attack of shyness and decided to hide behind the subtitles, which made me laugh out loud. Anyway, if you fancy giving it a go, maybe play with the video settings and see if you can change the subtitles so they don’t have a background.
As I’ve said in some previous posts, doing workouts in Portuguese is a good way of learning some of the more niche body vocabulary and you’ll get a decent stretch out of it too, so what’s not to like?
I’m still pondering whether to go for the course. I’ll sleep on it. I definitely like the idea, and I need something to boost me towards spoken fluency, but I’m not sure how it fits into the rest of my life. Also, with the third world war around the corner, maybe nothing matters any more.
Hm, got a bit dark there at the end, didn’t it? I caught a glance at the news. Sorry.
Closely related to the post about vir and chegar: what’s the difference between “vir a saber” and “vir saber”? Well, I’m glad you asked!
Vir a saber, as you’ll know if you read “The Spy Who Chegged Me” is a way of saying that you came to know something, perhaps in a slightly roundabout way, by chance, but the light dawned and then you knew.
Vir Saber is more like “I came to find out”.
This is good because I had been wondering how to interpret a line in one of the poems (it’s a song, actually: Flagrante by Antonio Zambujo) that I learned a week or two back. the people in the next room either “finally got to know about us” or “came to find out about us”. Well, now I know so here we go with a translation of the whole thing
Portuguese
English
Bem te avisei, meu amor Que não podia dar certo Que era coisa de evitar
I gave you fair warning, my love That this wasn’t going to turn out well And it was something best avoided
Como eu, devias supor Que, com gente ali tão perto Alguém fosse reparar
Like me, you have to suppose That with people so nearby Someone was going to notice
Mas não Fizeste beicinho E como numa promessa Ficaste nua para mim
But no You made a pouty face And as if in a promise Got naked for me
Pedaço de mau caminho Onde é que eu tinha a cabeça Quando te disse que sim
Bit of a wrong turn Where was my head at When I said yes to you
Embora tenhas jurado Discreta permanecer Já que não estávamos sós
Although you had sworn To remain discreet Since we weren’t alone
Ouvindo na sala ao lado Teus gemidos de prazer Vieram saber de nós
Hearing in the room next door Your moans of pleasure They came to find out about us
Nem dei pelo que aconteceu Mas mais veloz e mais esperta Só te viram de raspão
I didn’t even know what had happened But being faster and smarter They only caught a brief glimpse of you
A vergonha passei-a eu Diante da porta aberta Estava de calças na mão
I went through the shame In front of the open door With my trousers in my hand
It’s great isn’t it! Lots of really good stuff in there. The one line that I really had trouble understanding was the first line of the last stanza “A vergonha passei-a eu” which seems like he’s saying “I passed her the shame” as if he were trying to blame it all on the girl, but that doesn’t make sense for all sorts of reasons. The “-a” on the end of passei is actually referring to “a vergonha”. So it’s like “The shame, I passed through it”. Normally in conversation you’d say “passei pela vergonha” but poetic license applies. Here’s the full thing. I’ve probably posted it on here before but I just love it so much it’s worth repeating.
Structures I’ve seen in books and never been quite sure how to parse. According to Ciberdúvidas,
Vir + A + Infinitive
Is a periphrastic form of a verb. Wait, wait, hold it right there, what is a periphrastic form? It just means you use extra words to give the verb a slightly different dynamic or even to change the tense. In english it’s things like “You shall go to the ball” or “I do like chips”. It might change the verb’s tense or it might just make it sound more complete and more dynamic. Maybe like in English: How do you come to be in a place like this? It has the sense of ending up somewhere by chance, and it sounds more interesting than “How did you get here?” or “Why are you here?”
There’s an example in the book I’m reading now. Talking about Bolsonaro’s attempts to blame minorities for everything Ricardo Araújo Pereira says “Acredito que a gente ainda venha a descobrir que há inúmeros gays negros e índios na Lava Jato”.
Chegar + A + Infinitive
“Chegar a”, on the other hand is more like “finally managed to…”. It’s stressing the end of the action coming after a long time or a strenuous effort. Searching for an example similar to the one above, I hit on this one which is from a religious website talking how, after a lot of prayer, the believer can finally come to understand the project that God has laid out:
A oração também se torna caminho para o discernimento vocacional, não só porque Jesus mesmo convidou a rogar ao dono da messe, mas porque é somente na escuta de Deus que o crente pode chegar a descobrir o projeto que Deus mesmo traçou: no mistério contemplado, o crente descobre a própria identidade, «escondida com Cristo em Deus»
Is exactly the sort of thing I love. The writer is Ricardo Araújo Pereira, comedian, columnist and all round good guy (well, as far as I know) Anyway, in the passage above, he’s describing a song I don’t know and saying that if a foreigner were to hear it, although they would rightly spot that it sounds lovely, they probably wouldn’t understand it and certainly wouldn’t notice that the last word of every line is “proparoxítona”* and nor would they understand that the word “proparoxítono” itself is proparoxítona**. And he’s right: it is a lovely song and when I read this in bed last night I had no clue what Proparoxítono meant but I knew I had to find out as soon as I woke up.
First of all, let’s hear the song
Oh my god, that is the good stuff alright. I know it’s Brazilian Portuguese, not Portuguese Portuguese but Jesus Christ it’s good. Inject it directly into my veins! There is something slightly strange about the rhythm of the verse though isn’t there? And I never would have spotted what it was.
Before I get I to it, let’s lay a bit of groundwork by thinking about where the stress falls in a Portuguese word.
The vast majority of words in Portuguese put the stress on either the final syllable (if the last letter is r, l, z, m, u, i or n) or the penultimate one (basically, all other letters). Any exceptions to the rule need an accent to be added as a hint to the reader. So for example there are a lot of words that end in – ável or – ível that are pronounced with the stress on the a and the i respectively. If the accent wasn’t there you’d have to say incrivEL and confortavEL. But it’s pretty easy and you get used to it, and before you know it, you’re just used to the rhythm of Portuguese speech without even being conscious of it.
Proparoxítono means that the stress falls on the antepenultimate (last-but-two) syllable. These always have to have an accent because they break the normal rules, like bêbado (BÊ-ba-do) and mágico (MÁ-gi-co) and sábado (SÁ-ba-do) and última and único and tímido and… Well, and every other word he finishes a line with in the song, which is why you get this effect that’s really unusual in a Portuguese song, where the last two syllables of every line are unstressed.
Oh my god, that’s so satisfying. I love it! It’s the most value I’ve ever got out of a single paragraph, I think: a new word, a new song and a new way of noticing the rhythm of Portuguese music.
Anyway, if you want to know more, this video has some good analysis. It’s in Brazilian Portuguese too, so be warned if you’re trying to avoid the dialect. It’s worth making an exception for though.
*it has an a in the end here, unlike in the title, because its an adjective and palavra is feminine
**Now I know what you’re thinking: “Isn’t that the stuff Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying think should be used to cure Covid?” Close, but no, it’s not that either.
Tenho tentado muitas vezes recentemente correr 10 quilómetros dentro de uma hora, mas em corrida após corrida os meus tempos tenho andado do lado errado da hora. Pois, tenho meio século*. Quiçá não deva estar assim tão chocado com** o meu declínio! Mas enquanto há vida há esperança. Ontem finalmente atingi o meu objetivo. Depois de passar 5 semanas a treinar e a evitar hidratos de carbono e de ter perdido quatro quilogramas, fiz mais uma corrida num parque, à*”” chuva e cruzei a meta em 57:05. Muuuuiiito mais rápido do que o normal. Fiquei tão orgulhoso. Ainda há vida nestas pernas velhas.
(quando os organizadores deu me o meu número pessoal, foi 666. Que susto! Espero que a minha vitória não seja devida a Satã)
*=Tenho meio século sounds better than tenho um meio século – I have half century = I’m half (a) century old.
**=chocado com is another of those situations where the preposition isn’t what you expect. It’s “shocked with” not “shocked by”
***=and another! At the rain, not in the rain.
I got my clock time about 5 days later and it was even better! Under 56! Hail Satan!
I’m a 40 days into my long march to C1 proficiency. I’m doing pretty well. Here’s what I’ve been doing in each of the goals:
Make a new Twitter account, tweet only in Portuguese – Done! I’ve been updating daily, trying to pass as an illiterate Portuguese guy. 52 followers so far and nobody has come out and denounced me as an imposter but I daresay they are thinking it. I did have one person – a Brazilian – refer to me a a Tuguinho, which I enjoyed. She was a nutjob though so it probably doesn’t count.
Watch one Portuguese movie or series episode per week. Done! So far, half way through a series called Crónica dos Bons Malandros and I’ve watched one film. I don’t watch much telly generally so this is hard work.
Finally finish “A Actualidade em Português*” Done!
Then do one esercise of Português Atual* C1 or one from this course per day. Done! I’ve hit at least one exercise per day, usually quite a lot more. I’m about two thirds of the way through the book now and I’ll start on the course next.
Only read Portuguese books (exception for work-related books that I need to read for career development). Done. I’ve read no books in English since the start of the challenge apart from a work-related book about spreadsheets.
Listen to mainly portuguese audio. Could probably be better tbh. I’ve listened to quite a lot but it’s still in the minority.
Memorise one Portuguese poem per week. I’ve done four: Coroai-me De Rosas by Ricardo Reis, Segue o Teu Destino by the same author, Flagrante by Antonio Zambujo and Tenho Pena de Quem é o Meu Amigo by Gregório Duvivier. So I’m one short. This is really painful to be honest.
Write something each day on the Portuguese Writestreak subreddit. Done! My streak is up to 40 days now.
I’ve done some side-quests too! My first one was the project I did to try and understand the outline of Portuguese politics; then I went to see a night of (mostly) Portuguese music and this week I tried my hand at cooking a pudding called Pudim de Leite Condensado from a Portuguese recipe.
Behold its majesty!
Pudim de Leite CondensadoThe goodness within!
So that’s how I’m doing. The schedule is a lot easier than I expected. I’m finding it a faff to fit the weekly goals in, especially now I’m in full time work again, but I’ll keep plugging away!
Frankly, this image is not helping. If anything, it is adding to the confusion.
So I came across this freaky verb today: “Reaver“. No, not rever, reaver. It’s based on the verb “haver” but with the re- prefix. Its h disappears because it would be silent anyway: re+[h]aver=reaver.
Haver is a weird verb to start with because it’s almost always used in the third person singular and it means something like “exists” or “there is”, but it has another meaning, which is “to have” or “to possess” and that’s the sense that’s used with reaver. It means “have again”, “recoup” or “get back”.
Cool, cool, cool, so let’s look for examples of it in use? Most likely form we’ll come across will be re+[h]á=reá, right?
Wrong! Reaver is a defective verb, meaning it doesn’t have a full conjugation. So even though the most-used form of haver is the third person singular present indicative form, that form doesn’t even exist for reaver. The only two forms Priberam’s conjugation allows in the present tense are the nós and vós forms.
Some examples of legitimate use are given in the dictionary entry
Ainda não conseguiu reavero dinheiro que gastou (he still hadn’t been able to get back the money he’d spent)
Por duas vezes, eu perdi óculos escuros que nunca reouve (Twice I lost a pair of sunglasses that I never got back)
Paradoxalmente, era quando reavia as forças que a certa altura julgava exíguas (paradoxically it was while he was rebuilding his forces that, at some point, he judged them to be too weak)
Cada vez que se reouve uma canção corre-se o risco de reparar em aspetos musicais ou poéticos de que não nos tínhamos apercebido. (Every time one hears a song anew, one runs the risk of noticing a musical or poetical aspects that we hadn’t recognised before)
Well… that’s *not* an example of the past tense of reaver though. That’s the present tense of “reouvir“, meaning to hear again, surely…? And so is this citation from a blog called French Kissin’, also cited by Priberam
O disco não tenta sistematizar o tema, muito menos esgotá-lo. Talvez por ser tão despretensioso, ouve-se e reouve-se sem cansar. (The record doesn’t try to systematise the theme, let alone exhaust it. Maybe because it is so unpretentious, one can listen and relisten without getting tired of it)
Googling what I thought would be common forms of the verb, I didn’t really find many examples of it being used in the wild. So… It’s useful to know this exists in case it crops up in books but I don’t think I will be rushing to try and use this one in conversation!
If you’re hungry for more pain and suffering, you can find out more about reaver in this Ciberdúvidas article.
Here’s a text describing my visit to this exhibition in London. Butt_roidholds gave me some really detailed corrections and I’ve written the most instructive ones in footnotes at the bottom.
Fui ontem ao* Europe House (um prédio em Londres que pertence ao parlamento europeu) para ver uma exibição de arte chamada “Paula Rego and her Contemporaries”. Consiste numa coleção de obras de três artistas portugueses que moram/moraram no Reino Unido.
Ana Palma
Ana Palma faz arte sobre a temática** da feminilidade*** e do corpo feminino. O estilo dela lembra-me de… Sei lá… De ilustrações num livro sobre a natureza: corpos e rostos com tons de aguarela e lápis**** coloridos, sobreposições de diagramas biológicos (esqueletos, órgãos) e outros animais (principalmente besouros).
Um Desenho de Ana Palma
Cliff Andrade
O que mais me agarrou na secção de Cliff Andrade foi “A Tale of Two Madeira Cakes”. A obra consiste numa mesa com um bolo de mel (um bolo madeirense) e uma peça de Madeira Cake (um bolo inglês que antigamente foi bebido com vinho daquela ilha) e várias coisas quotidianas do dia a dia em Inglaterra e em Portugal. Fez-me rir porque algumas coisas (uma caneca do casamento real, uma outra dos “flopsy bunnies” , e hum… Uma garrafa de uísque escondida sob a cadeira por algum motivo!) existiam na minha casa quando era jovem em Preston mas hoje em dia estou casado com uma madeirense. É mesmo um crossover episode das nossas vidas nos anos 80!
A Mesa de Cliff Andrade
Paula Rego
E finalmente… Fico sem palavras para descrever os desenhos da terceira artista, Paula Rego. É incrível. Ela é a mais conhecida dos três artistas e quando vi os quadros, soube instantaneamente porquê!
Scarecrow by Paula Rego
Que pena que o sítio onde foram expostos era pouco acolhedor. Um visitante de cada vez, muito barulho, segurança rigorosa na entrada… Mas vale a pena apesar de tudo isto. Haverá uma exibição de obras da PR daqui a pouco na Galeria Tate mas sou hipster e não quero ir com os turistas onde está tudo fácil e conveniente!
*=As so often, I made the mistake of using “para”. Ir+para is used for permanent or long term moves. As this is just a quick visit it’s ir+a.
**=temática is better than tema because tema is one of those annoying words that’s masculine even though it ends in an a.
***=I’d expect this to be “femininidade” because -dade endings até usually cognate with the same word in English with a -ty ending like “eternidade” and “liberdade” but in this case its slightly different.
Luso 