In Love With Lisbon

Category: Learning Portuguese

  • Learning a language – Improving Listening Comprehension

    Azulejo 7If you are learning Portuguese there are a number of areas you need to study, one of which is listening comprehension. I’ve found that whilst I’m quick to learn vocabulary and understand written Portuguese, I find it harder to understand spoken Portuguese. I think whatever language a person learns, this is perhaps one of the most challenging aspects. We’ve all had that experience of listening to a foreign tongue and finding ourselves in the midst of what just seems like a torrent of unintelligible sounds. If anyone watches Lost, there is a great scene where the Korean character Jin is listening to everyone else having an argument and the viewer is treated to an idea of what it’s like to not understand English. The language is utterly garbled.

    This was much the same for me when I started to listen to Portuguese radio. There wasn’t a single word I understood, in fact I couldn’t work out where one word finished and another began! It seemed as though everything was said at a hundred miles an hour and I would never never be able to understand it.

    As I started to learn basic words and phrases however, I began to notice a wonderful thing. Once I knew those words and didn’t have to think about their meaning, I would suddenly hear them jump out at me from the radio broadcast. These moments of comprehension delighted me and gave me huge motivation to learn more. If I could understand one word then I could understand two, three, a phrase, a sentence!

    I remember one evening I had the radio on in the background whilst I was doing some writing. I wasn’t concentrating on it at all but suddenly became aware that I had a vague idea that they were talking about children and education. A few moments later there was a recording of children in a school. Whilst I couldn’t understand exactly what they were talking about I had somehow ‘got the gist’. I began to realise that I really was learning this language.

    I try to listen to Portuguese radio every day now and I do 15 minutes of ‘active listening’ no matter what. I purposefully try to hear every word, even if I don’t understand what all the words mean I practice being able to simply hear them. Whilst I am still far from fluent, it is a wonderful way to measure my understanding, to hear the pronunciation and tune my ears to the overall flow. Whilst I am lucky in that I have never found the pronunciation too difficult I still have room for improvement and it’s an excellent method for making sure you are pronouncing words correctly.

    Here’s an exercise I use a lot. Go to Euro News – at the top of the page you can choose which language you want to hear/see the news in by selecting your language in the drop-down list. Once you go to your chosen language you’ll see video clips from the day’s news. If you click on the title of the news item you’ll see that a written commentary follows. Most often, this is an exact transcript of the video piece although there’s sometimes a little variation.

    I try to not look at this at all before I start the video. I also don’t watch the video at first. I just click play and look away and see how much I can pick up by ear alone. I do this twice then the third time round I take a pen and paper and jot down any words I can hear. Then in English I note down what I think they might be saying and what the news item is about.

    Still not reading the text (you have to discipline yourself not to do this!), I then watch the video as well as listen. Of course the pictures will help you define the meaning further. Finally I read through the text and translate it, noting how many words I got right and where I made mistakes. I have found that by repeatedly doing this exercise my listening comprehesion is improving quickly. In fact today was the first time I had an telephone enquiry from someone Portuguese at my day job and though I was a little nervous, I found that I could understand the customer quite well. Whilst I had to ask him to speak slowly and I stumbled over a couple of words I realised how far I’d come from those days when everything was a jumble of sound.

    I hope you find this exercise useful. It certainly has been for me. Tomorrow I’ll provide a list of Portugeuse radio and television stations that you can access on the net so you too can improve you listening comprehension.

  • The Portuguese Alphabet and Pronunciation – Part 3

    Azulejo 6Welcome to the last part of The Portuguese Alphabet and Pronunciation series. Let’s just recap on what we’ve explored so far : -In Part 1 we looked at which letters are included in the Portuguese alphabet, how you say them and how the letters are pronounced. In Part 2 we looked at where the stress falls in a word. In part 3 we are going to take a look at accented letters, nasal sounds and diphthongs.

    Accented Letters
    There are five accents (diacritical marks is the posh term for them) used in European Portuguese.

    • Grave À
      Acute Á
      Circumflex Â
      Cedilla Ç
      Tilde Ã

    The word ‘diacritic’ comes from the Greek ‘to distinguish’. The purpose of these marks is most often to distinguish between words that look very similar. Giving a letter an accent changes the pronunciation of the letter within the word and sometimes the word itself. When the acute and circumflex or tilde accents are present in a word, they indicate where the stress should fall. So with a word such as alfândega (customs) the stress fall on the accented â rather than the last but one syllable as is the norm.

    Al-FÂN-dega not al-fân-DE-ga.

    The Grave
    So let’s take a look at the accents. I’ll start with the grave first as this isn’t used to denote a change in sound. The grave is there to signify that a contraction has occured between two words (usually a+a or a+as). A contraction means that the two words have been fused together to form a single word. It’s similar to using words like ‘it’s‘ instead of ‘it is‘ in English. In Portuguese the preposition ‘a’ would sound very clunky sitting beside the definate article ‘a’ so the two are pulled together into one and the grave shows us that this is the case.

    The grave is pronounced like a in ‘ago’.

    The Acute
    Moving onto the accute which is the most popular of all the accents, you’ll see this written over the vowels. When this occurs the vowel sound changes to ‘open’ when it’s A, E or O.

    Á is pronounced most often like the a in ‘cat’ and sometimes like the a in ‘father’. You will need to listen out for the variations

    É is pronounced like the e in ‘let’

    Ó is pronounced like the o in ‘hot’

    Here are some example, remember the stress falls on the accent
    átlas (atlas), ténis (tennis), óculos (glasses)

    The Circumflex
    This diacritic closes the sound of the vowels a, e and o

    Â is pronounced like a in ‘cat’
    Ê is pronounced almost like ey in ‘they‘ but maybe with a little of ai in ‘air’. Listen closely.
    Ô like o in ‘sore’

    Examples
    câmara (camera), mês (month), avô(grandfather)

    The Cedilla
    The cedilla is only present on the letter c. Its purpose is to indicate that the c is pronounced softly like c in ‘lace’

    Example
    Abraço (hug)

    The Tilde
    This diacritic indicates a sound is nasalised. When native English speakers first start to learn Portuguese they may find this difficult. However, just remember that we have a lot of nasalised words in English too like boing, bong, sung, bring. Try saying them slowly out loud and feel how these words resonante through your nose when you say them. Use the explanations below as a guide and try to accentuate the nasal quality of the words.

    ÃE is pronounced like ain in ‘main’ but the n is not sounded. Mãe (mother)

    ÃO is pronounced like the ow in ‘cow’ but more nasalised Coracão (heart)

    ÃE is pronounced like oing in ‘boing’ but lose the final g sound and emphasise the nasal quality. Põe (he/she puts)

    Diphthongs
    The last three examples above are also diphthongs. A dipthong is a combination of two letters within the same syllable. When pronounced we naturally slide from one letter to the next but both are pronounced. An English example is cow or pain. In ‘pain’ you can definitely hear each sound of the a and the i even though it has only one syllable.

    Here are the rest of the Portuguese diphthongs

    ai is pronounced like ie in ‘pie‘. Debaixo de (under)

    ao is pronounced like ow in ‘cow‘. Mau (bad)

    au is pronounced like ow in ‘cow‘ (yes the same as ao)

    oi is pronounced like oy in ‘boy‘. Oito (eight)

    ou is pronounced like ou in ‘though’. Sou (I am)

    ei is pronounced like ay in ‘hay. Cadeira (Chair)
    The best way to learn how Portuguese is pronounced is to listen to it. Whilst comparisons to English are useful, nothing beats listening to the real thing to hear the general nuances of speech. There are lots of Portuguese radio stations online; listen whilst you’re making dinner or having a bath. The sounds will soon become very familiar to you and you’ll find them easier to copy.

    Well I hope you have enjoyed this series on the Portuguese alphabet and found it useful for learning. Do feel free to comment on or question anything you see here.

    Now, if you think Portuguese is hard, take a look at this cheeky poem attributed to T. S. Watt about the English language. It made me smile.

    I take it you already know
    of tough and bough and cough and dough.
    Others may stumble, but not you, on hiccough, thorough, laugh and through.
    Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
    to learn of less familiar traps.

    Beware of heard, a dreadful word
    That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
    And dead – it’s said like bed, not bead.
    For goodness sake, dont call it deed!
    Watch out for meat and great and threat.
    They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.

    A moth is not a moth in mother,
    Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
    And here is not a match for there,
    Nor dear and fear for pear and bear.
    And then there’s dose and rose and lose –
    Just look them up – and goose and choose.
    And cork and work and card and ward.
    And font and front and word and sword.
    And do and go, then thwart and cart.
    Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start.
    A dreadful language? Man alive,
    I’d mastered it when I was five!