Archive for the year 2007
Samba School: Mocidade Independente de Padre Miguel Posted by Transparent Language on Nov 13, 2007
There are over a dozen major samba schools (escolas de samba) in Rio de Janeiro. G.R.E.S. Mocidade Independente de Padre Miguel is a terrific example of one of the major schools. Located in Samba City near downtown, Mocidade grew out of not a samba school, but in fact a local soccer team: A escola…
Swim the amazon in 66 Days! Posted by Transparent Language on Nov 12, 2007
…or just let this guy do it. Martin Strel is a world-class swimmer with a zeal for breaking records. Already having broken many Guinness World Records for distance swimming, including swimming the Adriatic Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Danube River and the Mississippi River, Stel decided to attempt the unthinkable: swim the entire Amazin river…
English Experts Posted by Transparent Language on Nov 8, 2007
This really fantastic blog for Brazilians learning English is quickly gaining steam. Over the past few months I have gotten to know (and respect) Alessandro Brandão, the publisher of English Experts. English Experts has been around for over a year, and as of late has been receiving much praise in the online community. Alessandro was…
Portuguese Treebank Posted by Transparent Language on Nov 8, 2007
Here’s one for the linguistics enthusiasts out there! A treebank, according to Wiki… …is a text corpus in which each sentence has been annotated with syntactic structure. Syntactic structure is commonly represented as a tree structure, hence the name treebank. Treebanks can be used in corpus linguistics for studying syntactic phenomena or in computational linguistics…
Obrigado Posted by Transparent Language on Nov 7, 2007
Obrigado means thank you in Portuguese. The first word many people learn in Portuguese, obrigado is certainly extremely useful. Since the word is the past participle of the verb obrigar, it is necessary to use the appropriate gender of the word. Males should say obrigado and females ought to use obrigada. As one might imagine…
False Friend: “Advertência” Posted by Transparent Language on Nov 6, 2007
Advertência does not mean Advertisement The word advertência actually means warning in Portuguese. In order to say advertisement, use either anúncio or propaganda.
Priberam Posted by Transparent Language on Nov 6, 2007
Priberam Informática is an irreplaceable online resource for the Portuguese language You may have noticed there aren’t a lot of traditional resources such as expansive, accurate dictionaries and grammar reference. Though this can be frustrating perhaps to the beginning student, once you know your way around the language a bit (i.e. are able to read…