Archive for 'Learning'
Do you want to… Posted by Transparent Language on Mar 16, 2008
Happy Monday! Let’s work on some useful questions. There are a few ways to ask someone if they want to do something in Portuguese. We have the main way, which we can use in the present simple and present continuous tenses: a. querer (to want) 1. Você quer…? [Voh-say kehhr] Do you want to…Example: Você…
Deixa! Posted by Transparent Language on Mar 3, 2008
Deixar [day-shar] is a useful verb in Portuguese because there quite a few expressions that use it. Literally, it means several things: “to leave”: Deixei meu cachorro com minha irmã.I left my dog with my sister. “to stop”: Ela deixou de fumar.She stopped smoking. “to allow”: Nos deixamos nosso filho sair com os amigos.We allow…
The Top Three Words You Need to be Negative in Portuguese Posted by Transparent Language on Feb 25, 2008
Let’s be real: sometimes we need words to describe negative situations, especially in Brazil, where complaining is a form of conversation. Here are the top three words you need to know. 1. chato (SHAH-too)This has got to be one of the best words in Brazilian Portuguese because it can be used in many ways. It…
Being rude in Portuguese Posted by Transparent Language on Feb 21, 2008
One of the things that is difficult for English speakers to deal with when learning Portuguese is the feeling that Portuguese can be really rude. Linguistically and culturally, Brazilian Portuguese has some important differences from English that one needs to be aware of. First of all, making requests in Brazilian Portuguese are generally made with…
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…
How Hard is Portuguese to Learn? Posted by Transparent Language on Oct 10, 2007
Question: “I want to learn to speak and read Portuguese; how hard will it be?” [First off, let me acknowledge that any thoughts on this topic are quite subjective, and as a passionate fan of the Portuguese language, I am arguably biased. That being said, I have learned a lot of Portuguese and also several…
To Be Posted by Transparent Language on Oct 2, 2007
Here are the different ways of saying ‘to be’ into Portuguese Like many verbs, the verb to be has not one, but several direct translations (ser, estar, ficar) in Portuguese, so it is important to learn and practice the correct verbal usage for each situation. 1. Ser is used: With an adjective: Ele é alto…