Tag: Video

Posted in English

New YouTube Channel

Posted on by Colin Lusk

If you enjoyed the audiobook post a couple of weeks ago you might also enjoy this new YouTube channel started by Booktuber Silent Wanderer. It’s called Em Voz Alta and it’s looking to release two chapters per week of short stories read by Portuguese readers, many of whom I already know from their own channels. So far, they’ve finished O Principezinho (everyone’s favourite!) and they’re well into The Canterville Ghost.

Don’t forget, you can use the videos as audiobooks even if the screen is off by following the suggestions in my most recent post, Story Hour

Posted in English

Story Hour

Posted on by Colin Lusk

One of the things that struck me after posting my list of audiobooks is that there aren’t many that are aimed at younger children, and if you’re a new reader that might be exactly what you need. I did check all the Portuguese children’s stories on Audible but with the exception of O Principezinho they were all Brazilian.

It seems like the best way to listen to stories for children is through videos. There are some on YouTube and some on the RTP Estudo em Casa site under “Hora da Leitura” (Reading Hour).

Here are a few lists you can tap into. If you want to listen to them as audiobooks, with the screen off and your phone in your pocket, there are a couple of settings you need to change on your phone, and I’ll put a video about that down at the bottom if you need it.

Obviously, you might be happy just to follow along with the video, especially since some of them show the actual text, or animations that can be good visual clues, but if you want to treat them like normal audiobooks, here’s a video that will explain how to set your phone up to play the audio only, even when the phone screen is off.

Posted in English

Turn On, Tune In, Learn Stuff

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I’ve been in a kind of limbo lately, simulatenously working too hard and feeling like I’m not getting anything done. Restarting this blog properly seems like a good way to get things moving a bit on the portuguese front at least. Here are a few updates on stuff that’s happening in my… lusosphere at the moment anyway

Podcasts and Videos

There are quite a few new podcasts and Youtube channels that have started up since the lockdown as teachers who used to do 1:1 lessons have had to find new ways to make money. Here are a couple I know about, but I’m sure you can find others if you dig around. These are all for beginners, so probably not much help if you have been learning for a while.

Mia’s Portuguese Podcast

AiLangua

Simpleton Portuguese (I find the branding on this one a bit naff but the first video I clicked on started with the guy saying “Even if you live in an anarcho-syndicalist commune where the concept of property has been made obsolete, you will eventually have to deal with possessives” and that’s a winning start to a video right there!)

Fletnix

So the big news is that Netflix has commissioned its first original series in European Portuguese. It’s a cold-war thriller called Gloria. Liz from Talk the Streets has done a couple of videos about watching TV in portuguese and one of the things she recommended was a Nteflix plugin called Language Learning with Netflix, which is quite useful if you want to have bilingual subtitles with your shows. I’ve been playing with it and it’s pretty good so I second her recommendation!

Posted in English

Talk the Streets

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I came across a new (to me) channel on YouTube today and the first video I tried was full of good tips. She’s British so she seems to be coming at it from a practical standpoint of how to get by as an immigrant in Portugal rather than doing a lot of detailed stuff about grammar. Bookmarked for later to try the rest of her videos.

Posted in Portuguese

Lembram-se de Restaurantes?

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Será que alguém no site se lembra “restaurantes”? Tenho saudades deles. Eram parecidos com a casa do meu avó, mas em vez de uma velha há uma equipa de pessoas vestidas de branco que cozinham os pratos e trazem-nos* para a mesa. Não se lembram? Bem, perguntam a alguém mais crescido.

Ontem, vi um vídeo antigo, gravado antes da quarentena, em que um “chefe de cozinha” (acho que este senhor era um género de super-herói ou padre) fez um Bacalhau à Brás. Infelizmente, como estava doente de um delírio, em vez de batatas, andava a usar outros ingredientes como abóbora, cenoura branca e carne de macaco.

*=interesting switch from imperfect to present here. “They WERE like my granny’s house but instead of an old lady there IS a team… that COOKS the dishes and BRINGS them” feels a bit wrong but the person who corrected this on italki was sure it was right.

Posted in English

Música em Casa

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I’ve really been enjoying the videos Rita Marrafa de Carvalho has been publishing from her house where she’s quarantined with her kids and a ukelele. They seem to be having a lot of fun and she can really sing/play too, which helps. I’ll try to embed one of them here but it’s on Facebook and Facebook is a bit awkward so I don’t know if it’ll work. They’re all really nice though, so you could do worse than go and look at her complete set on that platform if you have an account. A lot of them are on her Twitter too but I’m taking a Twitter break at the moment.

Posted in Portuguese

Acame, Açore, Aconquered

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I liked this video. It’s challenging (that açoriano accent! Holy crap, it’s like another language!) but it’s quite funny so it’s good, entertaining listening practice. He’s talking about english words that sound like Portuguese words and he gets a lot of mileage out of the idea.

Posted in English, Portuguese

Apenas Um Minuto

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Before my B2 exam I tried playing “Just A Minute” on video to get used to speaking fluently under pressure since the exam has an oral component, conducted on video and it’s my weakest link, so into the exam prep plan it went. At the time I didn’t think much of it and editing it for YouTube seemed too much of a faff, but then yesterday we heard that the presenter of the show, Nicholas Parsons, had died, so I decided to dust it off and post it online. I was glad I did. My grammar is all over the place – absolutely terrible – but I quite like the video as a whole, especially since my daughter agreed to help so you can hear her in the background.

Posted in English

The Farmer Wants A Wife

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I’ve just restarted Portuguese lessons after a long drought over the Christmas and New Year period. I kicked off with a nice easy session, with a teacher who does sessions where you watch, listen or read something together and she explains cultural references. This time I went for something super-lowbrow, namely a show called  “Quem Quer Namorar Com o Agricultor?” (“Who wants to date the farmer?”). It’s a reality TV franchise that has been shown in quite a few countries and arrived in Portugl last year. You can guess the premise: 5 farmers of various ages go to a fancy house where they are introduced to about 20 broody ladies and they have to decide which to invite home to the farm where they will be filmed reacting with horror to various unfamiliar smells and getting theatrically stink-eyed by the farmer’s mother/sister/teenage daughter. Presumbly at the end there will be a marriage or two but I haven’t got there yet.

Untitled

I don’t really have much time to watch TV, and I’ve never got into any reality TV apart from hate-watching a couple of series of The Apprentice, so it was sort of nice to have an excuse to watch something as unapologetically shit-headed as this. The languge level is pretty basic too, so it wsn’t hard to follow. I actually liked it and will definitely watch more but only when my wife isn’t there to take the piss out of me (which I will deserve of course because I mean really…)

I’ve also been watching, on my own time, a documentary series about the colonial wars in Africa, which is more educational but much, much harder work.