I made a new Memrise Deck, which I’ll probably add to as and when. It’s about “False Friends” (“Falsos Amigos”) and I’ve been meaning to write it for a while, and not just as an excuse to steal this title which is the name of a song by Fallout Boy.
False friends are words that look like they should mean one thing but they actually mean something else entitrely. It’s here if you’re interested.
Explique o sentido de
Zona defensiva
A zona defensiva é a área dum campo desportivo onde fica o golo a baliza* (uma rede ou qualquer “alvo” do desporto específico). A equipa em cuja zona a bola se encontra tem de fazer operações ou estratégias defensivas. Por exemplo, em futebol, ao guarda-redes é permitido agarrar a bola com as mãos na sua própria zona defensiva.
Ficar esquecidas** no tempo
Esta frase explica-se bastante bem. Depois de muito tempo, uma coisa pode ficar esquecida. Talvez o seu dono tenha falecido, talvez alguém a tenha tenha-a perdido num lugar selvagem ermo, ao qual onde ninguém vai, e lá está, perdida, esquecida durante anos.
Pernoitar
Pernoitar significa “passar uma noite num outro sítio” tal como um hotel, ou a casa de um amigo
Implementação
Implementação é um nome relacionado com o verbo “implementar”. Implementar uma coisa significa “levar a coisa a cabo”. É usado principalmente em situações profissionais.
*=golo is what you score, not what you score it in
** why “-as” and not “-o”? You’ll need to ask whoever wrote the book…
Thanks to Fernanda for the help with these
Como é que é, malta?
Sabiam que existem bananas? Sim? Boa. Mas sabiam que, ainda por cima, existem bananas vermelhas? OK, eu sei que muitos de vocês moram num país chamado “Brasil” e por isso talvez estejam fartos de ver bananas vermelhas nos supermercados, na mesinha do pequeno almoço e nos chapéus das vossas cantoras. Eu vivo na Europa e, ainda que me arme em orgulhoso por ser um homem de bom gosto e experiência vasta do nosso mundo por causa do meu conhecimento de bananas, até hoje, nunca encontrei uma vermelha.
Não são doces como a típica banana. Fritei-as e mergulhei os pedaços em molho picante.
I put up this video with the transcript from Planta Carnivóra the other day, with the idea that I could go back over it and tune into what he was saying with the aid of the text, because his accent is very different from what I’m used to and it seemed like a good exercise as part of my exam plan. However, it quickly became obvious that the transcipt doesn’t match. There’s no reason why that should be surprising of course; it’s an old sketch and I’m sure it’s been performed hundreds of times in many different variants. So, for the challenge, I’ve set about trying to change it to what I think he’s really saying. The altered bits are in red. There are probably a few errors because I don’t really understand the sentence structure in a few places, but hopefully it’s an improvement at least… Interested to note that the aunt and the mum seem to have swapped places…
Update 20/4/19 – yes, there were plenty of errors still and I have had help from Sophia. Mainly, they were mistakes in the original that I had missed rather than new errors I’d introduced. Like “Meu tio Gustavo”, which should have read “Meu tio que estava…” for example. Embarrassing.
Eu vou-lhes contar a história da minha ida à Guerra de 1908.
Eu trabalhava numa fábrica de produtos farmacêuticos. Um dia sem querer, deixei cair um comprimido e despediram-me. Fui lá para casa sentar-me numa cadeira que nós temos lá em casa para quando somos despedidos. Estava-me a balançar, entrou o meu tio que estava com o jornal que trazia o anúncio da guerra, que rezava assim
“Precisa-se Soldado que mate depressa!”
E disse a minha mãe,
“Olha, tu é que podias responder a esse anúncio.”
E disse a minha tia,
“Pois, mas é preciso levar cavalo!”
E disse a minha mãe,
“Mas eles na guerra dão cavalos.”
E disse a tia,
“Pois, e o meu sobrinho vai agora montar na guerra num cavalo que os outros já montaram. Sei lá quem é que já montou naqueles cavalos!”
Fomos à feira de gado para comprar o cavalo, mas só vendiam uns cavalos com as carroças e com as moscas, e a minha mãe disse,
“O meu filho não vai agora para a guerra encher a guerra de moscas… O meu filho, vai a pé mas vai limpo.”
Então fomos para casa. A minha mãe preparou me umas papas de sarrabulho, tomei um táxi e fui para a guerra. Cheguei à guerra eram sete horas da manhã, estava a guerra ainda fechada. E estava uma senhora que vendia castanhas à porta da guerra e eu perguntei,
“Minha senhora, faz favor, aqui é que é a guerra de 1908?”
E ela disse,
“Não senhor! Aqui é a guerra de 1906, a guerra de 1908 é mais acima.”
“Muito obrigado”
E subi dois anos. Cheguei lá cima, e já estavam a abrir as portas da guerra, que eram nove e tal e ‘tava o sentinela que me perguntou,
“Vens ao anúncio?”
“Sim, venho.”
E ele disse,
“E matas depressa?”
E eu disse,
“Por enquanto ainda só mato assim-assim… preciso de treinos.”
Então ele levou-me ao meu capitão, e o capitão perguntou-me se eu trazia a espingarda e eu disse que Não trazia, que até pensava que a ferramenta davam lá eles. E disse
“Eu trago é uma bala, que um vizinho meu guardou de recordação da guerra dos cem anos”
E diz o capitão,
“Como é que tu vais matar só com uma bala?”
E eu disse então,
“Eu disparo a espingarda, e depois, vou lá buscar a bala”,
Aí disse o tenente,
“Pois e a guerra pois vai parar de dois em dois minutos por sua causa!?”
Até o sargento disse
“Olha, a gente podia era atar uma guita à bala e depois puxava-se a bala!”
E disse o capitão,
“Pois, depois parte-se a guita, perde-se a guita, perde-se a bala. É tudo prejuízo não é?”
Então eles fizeram uma conferência e deram-me seis balas e mandaram-me matar. Estava eu, a matar, muito contente, chego ao pé do meu capitão e mandou-me ir de espia. Vestiram-me um vestido de organdi com uns laços cor-de-rosa, e fui para a guerra do inimigo, cheguei lá, bati à porta e o sentinela abriu frincha e disse,
“Quem é?”
E eu disse
“Sou a Maria Albertina”, malandrice!
E ele perguntou-me,
“Tu já trabalhas de espia há muito tempo?”
E eu disse,
“Não, só trabalho desde as 11!”
“E que é que tu queres?”
“Eu venho cá buscar os planos da pólvora”
E ele disse
“Não te dou os planos da pólvora, não te dou os planos da pólvora, não te dou os planos da pólvora”
E fui fazer queixa ao capitão dele. E eu disse-lhe,
Capitão, mas ele é um burro
“Deixa lá, almoça cá com a gente!”
Então, almocei na guerra do inimigo. Comemos uma cabeça de pescada muita grande e depois fui para a minha guerra. E quando eu cheguei lá ia estava a contar ao meu capitão, entra um soldado a correr, a correr
“Meu capitão, meu capitão, fizemos um prisioneiro!”
Diz
“Sim, onde é que ele está?”
“Não quis vir.”
Porque cá há prisioneiros que são teimosos, a gente puxa, puxa e eles não vêm. Feitios.
Então o meu capitão disse,
“Então, se eles não dão os planos da pólvora vai lá buscar o avião, pronto”
Porque como a gente se dava muito bem com o inimigo, nós tínhamos só um avião que dava para todos. Eles bombardeavam às Segundas, Quartas e Sextas, e a gente bombardeava às Terças, Quintas e Sábados, e lá íamos morrendo.
Mas o capitão disse que não podia dar o avião, porque estavam a adaptar uma torneira para andar a jacto”
Fui-me embora para a minha guerra e quando cheguei lá estava o meu capitão à porta da guerra e disse-me,
“Olha, podes-te ir embora porque a guerra acabou-se!”
Disse
“Acabou-se??”
“Acabou-se. Veio cá o fiscal, a gente não tinha licença de porte de arma. Levaram as metralhadoras, as pistolas, as bazucas”
E foi assim que… ai ai ai ai ai
Here are the vocabulary words I didn’t already know:
Carroça = Cart
Sarrabulho = Coagulated pigs blood. Er… yum?
Guita = Wire
Organdi = Organdy
Frincha = A small opening – I’m picturing the little window the guard looks through at the gates of the Emerald City when Dorothy arrives.
Pescada = Hake
Pólvora = gunpowder
Jacto = jet… and I assume “torneira” can mean “propeller” too, although I only know it as “tap” and that’s the only definition give in my dictionary too…
Feitios = shapes (which I knew) but seems to mean “it takes all sorts” here.
Feira de gado = livestock market
In a very occasional series entitled “disagreeing with my Portuguese teacher”, here’s a more complicated example of tortuous grammar from the book I’ve just finished that underscores the reason I have to keep struggling with the word “se”.
It’s confusing AF so I’ll highlight the salient words in red in both the original and translations so you can see where they go.
Talvez que o marido da tia Emília se tivesse podido salvar se estivesse na cidade e tivesse dinheiro para o médico e para os tratamentos.
I was convinced one of these was a reflexive pronoun but my teacher said they were both condicionals, not pronouns, which would make it
Maybe Aunt Emília’s husband if he had been able to save and if he was in the city and had enough money for the doctor and the treatments.
I scratched my head over this for a while because there doesn’t seem to be a main verb. I’ve just asked m’wife and she translated it the same way I would have, which makes me feel vindicated
Maybe Aunt Emília’s husband would have been able to save himself, if he was in the city and had enough money for the doctor and the treatments.
It’s confusing because the three verbs underlined in the original quote are in imperfect subjunctive tense, which can be triggered by “se” when it’s used as a conditional, so it’s hard to see if that “tivesse” is triggered by se (meaning if) just before it or by the “talvez” at the beginning of the sentence.
I reckon the first “se” is a reflexive pronoun and I’ve got my wife’s entirely unbiased opinion backing me up. In a less complicated sentence you could write it as “Se tem podido salvar” or “he has been able to save himself”. Or even less complicatesd, “Salvou-se”.
So there you go, if even two portuguese people can’t agree the meaning of a sentence, there’s no need to feel embarrassed if you don’t get it right straight away either.
This is an updated version of my brainstorm about the four intractable problems (“4 evil exes”) I identified before my first B2 exam, trying to wrestle with the subject by putting it into a post, because explaining something to someone else is usually a pretty good way of learning it yourself. Since I wrote the first version, and then my second my understanding as developed a bit so I thought I’d update this to solidify that knowledge. Just ignore version 3 – it was just like 2 but with some new mistakes. In fact, in general, remember I’m writing this mainly as a way of helping my own understanding and you’d be crazy to believe anything I say. If you’re confused, go and ask a proper teacher.
Quite often in Portuguese, the word “Se” crops up in unexpected places, hanging around verbs, and it isn’t always clear what it’s doing there. Here is a breakdown of its possible uses,
This is the odd one out, really, and the easiest one to spot. In this case, the word happens to be hanging around the sentence and maybe the verb will have to change as a result but in this case it’s not really strongly interacting with the verb, so you can just translate it in your had as “if” and move on. If you’re at B2 level and don’t already know about the subjunctive imperfect, go and have a read. Otherwise, forget it.
Não sei se na vossa casa sobrou muito chocolate dos ovos de Páscoa?
Or
Se tivesse dinheiro o suficiente, eu encheria a casa de livros
Se is one of the pronouns used in the construction of reflexive verbs. Reflexive verbs. Reflexive verbs are just verbs in which the subject and the object can be the same thing. For example, “I can dress myself”. I am the one who is doing the dressing, and I am the one being dressed, so it’s a reflexive verb. In Portuguese and other romance languages, reflexive verbs seem a bit counter-intuitive.Sometimes they are used in situations you wouldn’t expect and sometimes they mean “each other” instead of “oneself”.
Of course, it’s not always “se”. The complete set of pronouns looks like this:
Here are some examples of reflexive verbs:
| Standard | Meaning | Reflexive | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| lembrar | to remind | lembrar-se | to remember |
| amar | to love | amar-se | to love one another |
| apaixonar | to fall in love | apaixonar-se | to fall in love with each other |
| deitar | to lay (something) down | deitar-se | to lie down |
| levantar | to lift | levantar-se | to get up |
| beijar | to kiss | beijar-se | to snog each other |
| banhar | to bathe (someone) | banhar-se | to have a bath |
| chamar | to call (someone) | chamar-se | to be called/named |
| lavar | to wash something | lavar-se | to have a wash |
| sentar* | to put someone in a sitting position? | sentar-se | to sit down |
| sentir | to sense something | sentir-se | to be conscious of something |
| voltar | to turn, return, re-do | voltar-se | to turn around |
| servir | to serve | servir-se | to help oneself to |
| vestir | to dress someone | vestir-se | to get dressed |
| ** | suicidar-se | to kill oneself | |
| cortar | cut | cortar-se | to cut oneself |
| achar | to find | achar-se | to find oneself |
*sentar apparently exists but it’s not used often
**When I first wrote this article I confidently said that “suicidar” couldn’t exist in a non-reflexive form since you can’t suicide someone else. However, you’ll occasionally come acorss this sort of thing:
https://twitter.com/OhFazFavor/status/774212893189496832?s=09
which my teacher tells me is just crap grammar.
And here are a few that need pronouns with them (to call back to this post)
| Infinitive | Meaning |
|---|---|
| aproveitar-se de | to take advantage of |
| convencer-se de | to convince oneself about |
| lembrar-se de | to remember about |
| esquecer-se de | to forget about |
| queixar-se de | to complain about |
| rir-se* de | to laugh about |
| decidir-se a | to decide |
| dedicar-se a | to dedicate oneself to |
| acostumar-se com | to get familiar with |
| parecer-se com | to resemble |
| surpreender-se com | to be surprised by |
*surprisingly, rir is supposed to be reflexive most of the time. You’re not laughing something, you’re just laughing. There’s nothing on the receiving end of the verb. People often use it non-reflexively but that’s an informal use.
Reflexive pronouns usually go after the verb in european portuguese (but there are exceptions such as negatives, questions and after words like “que”. In Brasil they just whack it in front of the verb, the dirty beasts.
If it’s a compound verb, you have options. With ir+infinitive, the pronoun can attach either to the stem or to the auxiliary
Ele vai-se encontrar com ela.
Ele vai encontrar-se com ela.
but with ter+participle it has to go after the auxiliary
Ele tinha-se separado de sua namorada.
Ele tinha separado-se de sua namorada.
Note that we usually think of reflexive verbs as “bouncing back” to the subject, so the subject and the object are the same person, like when we say in english “I’ve wet myself” instead of “I’ve wet the baby’s head”. This isn’t always true as we can see from the list above, and we can also think of it as having some sort of mutuality
Pedro e Maria deram-se as mãos.
They held each other’s hands, not their own hands.
When discussing a generalised situation – like the english “one”, described in this Portuguese grammar article as “sujeito indeterminado” (unknown subject)
One shouldn’t drink too much
It’s not used very often these days because it’s usually felt to sound a bit pretentious, so people will usually use “you”
You shouldn’t drink too much
which of course sounds as if the speaker is admonishing their listener directly to lay off the booze. This is a bit of a loss to the english language, because being able to speak in general terms is useful and avoids a lot of misunderstandings.
The Portuguese haven’t made this mistake and use “se” as an impersonal pronoun, which makes more sense, I think.
Here’s an example that really threw me because it was used with the verb “ser”
Há uma frase inglesa que está sempre presente: “I had to smile“. Significa que se foi obrigado a sorrir
Se foi means “one was”. Some person was obliged to smile.
Similarly
Sabia que é preciso pagar para se ser santo?
I was confused because it looks like “Saint” is a noun and it’s the object of the verb so it shouldn’t need the se, but santo is more like a condition – an adjective. “Did you know that you need to pay to be [holy]” not “Did you know that you need to pay to be [a saint]” Now this seems to be a bit subtle but it seems to be a way of amphasising the verb as a verb. It’s optional, in other words, but it sounds better. Bloody hell…
Ou lá o que se faz no Facebook
Or whatever happens on facebook.
Here’s a nice example that’s a lot harder to translate but pretty.
O êxito do celebre poema de Florbela Espanca deve-se à maneira como trata o verbo amar como intransitivo. Ama-se como chove. Perguntar: “Mas amar quem?” é como perguntar: “Chove quem?”
OK, I said it would be hard to translate but I’ll have a go. Amar is normally a transitive verb (X loves Y.) but here Miguel Esteves Cardoso praises Florbela Espanca for the way she uses it intransitively (X loves.) and he uses “se” to talk about how people in general love.
The success of the well-known poem of Florbela Espanca is owed to the way in which she treats the verb “to love” as an intransitive. One loves like it rains. To ask “but love who” is like asking “rain who?”
Um… well, I hope I’m not too far off the mark there. Incidentally, I think this is the poem he means.
Notice that he also uses “deve-se”, and that brings me onto the next type of se:
Passive voice is when you use a phrase like “it was done”, “mistakes were made”, “a murder was committed” instead of the more direct “He did it”, “We made a mistake” or “Someone committed murder”. I quite like this form of words and use it in writing but some people find it vague and evasive, and for that very reason it’s popular in political speech and PR briefings.
O êxito do […] poema […] deve-se… means “The poem’s success is owed…” [or “is due to”]
“O livro publicou-se” means “the book was published”
Em Portugal bebe-se muito café (A lot of coffee is drunk in Portugal)
or
Fala-se Inglês (English is spoken here)
and in the negative…
Não se fala Espanhol no Brasil
One context that will be familiar to a lot of portuguese learners is this from the introduction to some of the Diálogos in the Practice Portuguese Podcast:
As conversas que se seguem são baseadas em factos verídicos
“The conversations that follow are based on true facts.”
Now, it’s not always clear whether a phrase like
Em Portugal bebe-se muito café
should be translated as “a lot of coffee is drunk” (passive voice) or “one drinks a lot of coffee” (imperonal pronoun) but, really, is there a lot difference?
Apparently the key is whether you can replace it with Ir+participle. Passive verbs described in the presvious section are known as “passiva sintética” to distinguish it from “passive analítica” which is where you say something like “Muito café é bebido em Portugal” and that works, so this is a passive voice construction. The only difference it seems to make is that in passive voice, the verb changes with the subject
“Muitos pasteis são comidos em Portugal” => “Comem-se muitos bolos no Brasil”
…which means it’s reflexive, so if many cakes are eaten, it needs to be comem-se, not come-se.
But in the example given on the web page….
“Trabalha-se muito por aqui” can’t easily be transformed in the same way without changing the meaning “É trabalhado muito por aqui.” It doesn’t really work. So it won’t ever need to become “Trabalham-se muito por aqui” or “Trabalhas-te muito por aqui”. We don’t know who the subject is so we won’t ever make the verb agree with the subject.
I think in the more ambiguous cases, it’s best not to worry about translating and just read it as it is, and not think of it as directly equivalent to either english form. The upshot of both sentences is that an awful lot of coffee drinking goes on in Portugal. This is a good way of training yourself not to automatically translate everything into english but instead just try and absorb the meaning from the portuguese words.
I’t’s not quite clear how phrases like “Vou-me embora” fit into this. The subject is known and it’s not really passive. My teacher said it’s to do with emphasis, and the fact that it’s intransitive (ie, it’s a verb that just happens without needing to happen to something) probably helps too.
Já li dois livros da mesma autora e este terceiro também é muito divertido. A protagonista é uma menina que tem 9 anos. Mora com a família e tem uma nova irmã. Apesar do título, uma grande parte da história trata das suas duas avós (das quais apenas uma ainda está viva), e as vidas duras delas quando eram novas. Um homem que mora lá na rua ficou preso antes da revolução (o livro foi escrito em. 1980). A história da família espelha a história recente do país. E a bebé? A narradora não se dá com ela no início mas ao longo dos meses, ela aprende, pouco a pouco, aceitar e amar a sua irmã.
É um livro juvenil, claro, mas Alice Vieira escreve tão bem que um adulto pode gostar também.
OK, let’s have a look at that homework from the other day about reflexive and non-reflexive uses of verbs and see how badly wrong it all was. Underlinings and crossings out are correctios, red text is just highlighting the bit I was trying to get right
1a) Sabe que é preciso pagar para se ser português? [just missing a preposition]1b) Quer tenha cidadania quer não, não é possível ser um português verdadeiro se não foi criado lá.2a) O Cristianismo* incentiva os seus seguidores aseserem mais honestos. [missing a preposition but doesn’t need the “se”]2b) O Cristianismo* ajuda os seus aderentes a serem pessoas melhores.*=I wrote “cristandade” but although that exists I think it’s more like “Chistendom” than “Christianity”3a) A frase que se segue é mais um exemplo [this is right but the “se” is passive voice rather than reflexive]3b) Esta frase segue a frase passada.4a) Se ganhar o Euromillions, ficar-me-ei feliz? [I seem to have had some sort of senior moment here and chosen completely the wrong verb, but the reflexive aspect is legit (but optional) to give emphasis to the verb]4b) Se mudar o meu modo de vida serei uma pessoa mais feliz?5a) Fiquei desiludido com o iTalki e por isso tornei-me membro do Lingq5b) Fiquei desiludido com o chuveiro e por isso abri o torneira para tomar banho. [another bad verb but more understandable. Portuguese people open (abrir) and close (fechar) their taps, they don’t turn them. I should also confess that when I originally wrote it, I almost put “tornozelo” instead of “torneira”. Confusing: “I was disappointed with the shower so I turned the ankle”]6a) Ri-me muitas vezes enquanto li este livro6b) Riu-se quando pensou na sua primeira tentativa a falar português.
So, not very good, really. I think the explanation I gave and wrote into the last version of “Oh Se Can You See” wasn’t quite right.
Rir is basically an intransitive, pronomial verb according to Priberam, so although it’s often seen in the wild without its pronoun, formally (and in the exam) it’s best to use it with the pronoun, much like “lembrar”
The se in “se ser” in 1a and 4a or in expressions like “ir-se embora” is used when you want to stress the verb but isn’t strictly necessary in either case.
Clearly still some work on prepositions needed. I’m going to do some more work on that later. Obviously the thing I need to stop doing is translating english phrases literally, using the same prepositions I’d use in english.
This is an updated version of my brainstorm about the four intractable problems (“4 evil exes”) I identified before my first B2 exam, trying to wrestle with the subject by putting it into a post, because explaining something to someone else is usually a pretty good way of learning it yourself. Since I wrote the first version, and then my second my understanding as developed a bit so I thought I’d update this to solidify that knowledge.
Quite often in Portuguese, the word “Se” crops up in unexpected places, hanging around verbs, and it isn’t always clear what it’s doing there. Here is a breakdown of its possible uses,
This is the odd one out, really, and the easiest one to spot. In this case, the word happens to be hanging around the sentence and maybe the verb will have to change as a result but in this case it’s not really strongly interacting with the verb, so you can just translate it in your had as “if” and move on. If you’re at B2 level and don’t already know about the subjunctive imperfect, go and have a read. Otherwise, forget it.
Não sei se na vossa casa sobrou muito chocolate dos ovos de Páscoa?
Se is one of the pronouns used in the construction of reflexive verbs. Reflexive verbs. Reflexive verbs are just verbs in which the subject and the object can be the same thing. For example, “I can dress myself”. I am the one who is doing the dressing, and I am the one being dressed, so it’s a reflexive verb. In Portuguese and other romance languages, reflexive verbs seem a bit counter-intuitive.Sometimes they are used in situations you wouldn’t expect and sometimes they mean “each other” instead of “oneself”.
Of course, it’s not always “se”. The complete set of pronouns looks like this:
Here are some examples of reflexive verbs:
| Standard | Meaning | Reflexive | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| lembrar | to remind | lembrar-se | to remember |
| amar | to love | amar-se | to love one another |
| apaixonar | to fall in love | apaixonar-se | to fall in love with each other |
| deitar | to lay (something) down | deitar-se | to lie down |
| levantar | to lift | levantar-se | to get up |
| beijar | to kiss | beijar-se | to snog each other |
| banhar | to bathe (someone) | banhar-se | to have a bath |
| chamar | to call (someone) | chamar-se | to be called/named |
| lavar | to wash something | lavar-se | to have a wash |
| sentar* | to put someone in a sitting position? | sentar-se | to sit down |
| sentir | to sense something | sentir-se | to be conscious of something |
| voltar | to turn, return, re-do | voltar-se | to turn around |
| servir | to serve | servir-se | to help oneself to |
| vestir | to dress someone | vestir-se | to get dressed |
| ** | suicidar-se | to kill oneself | |
| cortar | cut | cortar-se | to cut oneself |
| achar | to find | achar-se | to find oneself |
*sentar apparently exists but it’s not used often
**When I first wrote this article I confidently said that “suicidar” couldn’t exist in a non-reflexive form since you can’t suicide someone else. However, you’ll occasionally come acorss this sort of thing:
https://twitter.com/OhFazFavor/status/774212893189496832?s=09
which my teacher tells me is just crap grammar.
And here are a few that need pronouns with them (to call back to this post)
| Infinitive | Meaning |
|---|---|
| aproveitar-se de | to take advantage of |
| convencer-se de | to convince oneself about |
| lembrar-se de | to remember about |
| esquecer-se de | to forget about |
| queixar-se de | to complain about |
| rir-se* de | to laugh about |
| decidir-se a | to decide |
| dedicar-se a | to dedicate oneself to |
| acostumar-se com | to get familiar with |
| parecer-se com | to resemble |
| surpreender-se com | to be surprised by |
*surprisingly, rir is supposed to be reflexive most of the time. You’re not laughing something, you’re just laughing. There’s nothing on the receiving end of the verb. People often use it non-reflexively but that’s an informal use.
When discussing a generalised situation – like the english “one”
One shouldn’t drink too much
It’s not used very often these days because it’s usually felt to sound a bit pretentious, so people will usually use “you”
You shouldn’t drink too much
which of course sounds as if the speaker is admonishing their listener directly to lay off the booze. This is a bit of a loss to the english language, because being able to speak in general terms is useful and avoids a lot of misunderstandings.
The Portuguese haven’t made this mistake and use “se” as an impersonal pronoun, which makes more sense, I think.
Here’s an example that really threw me because it was used with the verb “ser”
Há uma frase inglesa que está sempre presente: “I had to smile“. Significa que se foi obrigado a sorrir
Se foi means “one was”. Some person was obliged to smile.
Similarly
Sabia que é preciso pagar se ser santo?
I was confused because it looks lihe “Saint” is a noun and it’s the object of the verb so it shouldn’t need the se, but santo is more like a condition – an adjective. “Did you know that you need to pay to be [holy]” not “Did you know that you need to pay to be [a saint]” There isn’t really a thing or an object on the receiving end of the verb.
Ou lá o que se faz no Facebook
Or whatever happens on facebook.
Here’s a nice example that’s a lot harder to translate but pretty.
O êxito do celebre poema de Florbela Espanca deve-se a maneira como trata o verbo amar como intransitivo. Ama-se como chove. Perguntar: “Mas amar quem?” é como perguntar: “Chove quem?”
OK, I said it would be hard to translate but I’ll have a go. Amar is normally a transitive verb (X loves Y.) but here Miguel Esteves Cardoso praises Florbela Espanca for the way she uses it intransitively (X loves.) and he uses “se” to talk about how people in general love.
The success of the well-known poem of Florbela Espanca is owed to the way in which she treats the verb “to love” as an intransitive. One loves like it rains. To ask “but love who” is like asking “rain who?”
Um… well, I hope I’m not too far off the mark there. Incidentally, I think this is the poem he means.
Notice that he also uses “deve-se”, and that brings me onto the next type of se:
Passive voice is when you use a phrase like “it was done”, “mistakes were made”, “a murder was committed” instead of the more direct “He did it”, “We made a mistake” or “Someone committed murder”. I quite like this form of words and use it in writing but some people find it vague and evasive, and for that very reason it’s popular in political speech and PR briefings.
O êxito do […] poema […] deve-se… means “The poem’s success is owed…” [or “is due to”]
“O livro publicou-se” means “the book was published”
Em Portugal bebe-se muito café (A lot of coffee is drunk in Portugal)
or
Fala-se Inglês (English is spoken here)
and in the negative…
Não se fala Espanhol no Brasil
Now, it’s not always clear whether a phrase like
Em Portugal bebe-se muito café
should be translated as “a lot of coffee is drunk” (passive voice) or “one drinks a lot of coffee” (imperonal pronoun) but, really, is there a lot difference? I think in the more ambiguous cases, it’s best not to worry about translating and just read it as it is, and not think of it as directly equivalent to either english form. The upshot of both sentences is that an awful lot of coffee drinking goes on in Portugal. This is a good way of training yourself not to automatically translate everything into english but instead just try and absorb the meaning from the portuguese words.
While I’m on the subject of silly moves by language sites, can I just rant about the official site run by the Portuguese government? It has a lot of exercises which might be quite useful. So… what’s the problem? You have to do them in order. I had a look at the first A1 exercise and that looks fine for a beginner, but all the A2, B1 and B2 exercises are locked and I can’t access them till I’ve worked through a complete course aimed at total novices, through the pre-intermediate levels to reach the level I’m at now.
And so, a useful site is rendered worthless for a big chunk of its potential punters.
Luso 