The Focus of This Lesson is Portuguese Prepositions and Phrasal Prepositions
No botão do meio.
"The middle button."

Prepositions show the relationships that things have to each other. In the Beginner and Absolute Beginner series we spoke about many of the most common prepositions in Portuguese. In this lesson we are going to talk about several new prepositions and a common grammatical structure we call phrasal prepositions.

For the grammarians, a phrasal preposition is two or more words that grammatically function as a single prepositional unit or concept.

For Example:

1. Ela chegou antes de mim.
   "She arrived before me."
2. Ele desceu lá para baixo.
   "He went down there."

For example, the phrase por baixo breaks apart as por and baixo which could mean "for low," "for short," or even "for quiet," but it doesn't, it means "below," a single prepositional concept.

Another example is the phrase em cima which breaks apart as em and cima. Literally, it could be "on up," "in above," or "at high," but it doesn't, it means, and always means "on top of."

Examples from This Dialogue:

1. Nesse botão aí de cima.
   "That button on the top."
2. Mas agora tem um buraco em baixo da cerca.
   "But now there's a hole underneath the fence."

Sample Sentence:

1. Tem um buraco cinco metros na sua frente.
   "There's a hole five meters in front of you."

Language Tip

Now a quick tip about something that you see a few times in the dialogue—the phrase para a. You'll remember that para is a preposition but a can be an article or a preposition. In this case, a is acting as an article. So here's the tip, whenever you see or hear para followed by a it's always an article, never a preposition, except for maybe in some strange poem. Plus the para and the a get slurred together when they are said at native speed. para-a. It sounds kind of like the a is prolonged and there's a little bump in it.

que (noun + adjective)!
We'll start by looking at the structure que... In the dialogue, Juliana said Que lugar lindo! which we translated as "What a beautiful place!" Que... (followed by a noun and an adjective) works the same as "What a..." or "What an..." Some examples are: Que filme interessante! which means, "What an interesting movie!" and Que lugar quente! to mean, "What a hot place!"

X
Next we have X. In Portuguese we use X as an equivalent for "cheese" when taking pictures. Actually X is the name of the letter "-x" in Portuguese. In Brazil, they say this because when you read the English word "cheese" in Portuguese, the "ch-" makes a "sh-" sound thus making "cheese" sound like "sheeze" which sounds almost exactly like the letter "-X" in Portuguese. So, it is common to hear someone saying digam X before taking pictures to mean "Say cheeeese."

moço and moça
The next words we'll look at are moço and moça. Moço and moça respectively mean "young man" and "young woman." These are very good words to use when calling someone's attention in the street, for example. They are nice and polite words, but they are not old or too formal. Just remember to use moço for "man" and moça for "woman." The "-os" are closed: moço and moça.

conferir
Conferir is the Portuguese verb for "to check." In the dialogue the park-goer said Confere se ficou boa which we translated as "Check to see if it turned out good." It sounds a lot like "to confirm" but that's a false connection I made when I was learning Portuguese. "To confirm" in Portuguese is confirmar but "to check" is conferir. You could use this verb like this, Vou conferir to say "I'll check," or like this, Ele conferiu a lista de afazeres? which means "He checked the task list."

No Mountains

There is some beautiful scenery in Brazil and a good camera is a must. Whereas Brazil is pretty flat, not any real mountains anywhere, I grew up in the Rocky Mountains. The Rio and São Paulo areas have lots of large hills that are quite pretty but no mountains. On a bus ride through Mato Grosso I remember waking up at dawn and looking out the window. The bus was driving on a curvy road on the edge of a mountain that had a deep canyon at the bottom. If it hadn't been so pretty, I'd have been terrified.