Learn about verb and noun agreement and Brazilian social support
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| INTRODUCTION |
| Sílvia: Olá! Bem-vindo ao PortuguesePod101.com! |
| Braden: Upper Beginner Season 1, Lesson 23, A Bit of Portuguese Gossip. Hello and welcome back to PortuguesePod101.com, the fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Portuguese. I’m joined here in the studio by… |
| Sílvia: Hello, everyone! Sílvia here. So Braden, please tell us what we’ll be learning in this lesson. |
| Braden: In this lesson, you’ll learn a little bit about verbs and nouns and how they interact with each other. |
| Sílvia: Where does this conversation take place and who is it between? |
| Braden: This conversation takes place in the afternoon, at home, and it’s between Maria and Lucas. |
| Sílvia: What’s the formality level? |
| Braden: Well, they’re friends, so it’s informal. |
| Sílvia: Let’s listen to the conversation. |
| DIALOGUE |
| Maria: Como você sabe? |
| Lucas: Uns cinco dias atrás, eu estive na casa dela e ela falou. |
| Maria: Mas será que foi assim mesmo? |
| Lucas: Com certeza. Eu sei que parece inacreditável mas é verdade. |
| Maria: Wow. E agora? O que fazemos? |
| Lucas: Agora é só esperar. Não podemos fazer mais nada. |
| Braden: One time slowly. |
| Maria: Como você sabe? |
| Lucas: Uns cinco dias atrás, eu estive na casa dela e ela falou. |
| Maria: Mas será que foi assim mesmo? |
| Lucas: Com certeza. Eu sei que parece inacreditável mas é verdade. |
| Maria: Wow. E agora? O que fazemos? |
| Lucas: Agora é só esperar. Não podemos fazer mais nada. |
| Braden: One time fast, with translation. |
| Maria: Como você sabe? |
| Maria: How do you know? |
| Lucas: Uns cinco dias atrás, eu estive na casa dela e ela falou. |
| Lucas: About 5 days ago, I was at her house and she said so. |
| Maria: Mas será que foi assim mesmo? |
| Maria: But are you sure that's really what happened? |
| Lucas: Com certeza. Eu sei que parece inacreditável mas é verdade. |
| Lucas: Very sure. I know it seems unbelievable, but it's true. |
| Maria: Wow. E agora? O que fazemos? |
| Maria: Wow, so what now? What do we do? |
| Lucas: Agora é só esperar. Não podemos fazer mais nada. |
| Lucas: Now we just wait. We can't do anything else. |
| POST CONVERSATION BANTER |
| Braden: Sílvia, could you tell us a little bit about Brazilian culture and talking? |
| Sílvia: Brazilian culture is very talkative. We like to talk and we’ll talk about just about anything. |
| Braden: And that’s very true. Mixed with this talkative culture is a kind of, at least in my opinion, kind of a social support. It often seems like gossip, but they tell each other about what’s going on in their lives and how they’re getting on and all these kinds of different things. This extends to the lives of the neighbours and friends and family. |
| Sílvia: To me, this is not gossip, although there certainly is a lot of that around. I don’t know if just talking about the lives of others is necessarily a bad thing or that it’s malicious by nature. |
| Braden: Often, it’s someone has a friend who needs some help, so they’re talking to someone to see if that person can help this friend or something like that. Brazilians do that because they care about one another and they’re trying to help one another. It’s very deep part of their culture, is helping one another. But, sometimes, with some people, this can kind of being a little bit malicious, so you need to be careful about that. Let’s take a look at the vocabulary. |
| VOCAB LIST |
| Braden: The first word we’ll look at is… |
| Sílvia: atrás [natural native speed] |
| Braden: behind |
| Sílvia: atrás [slowly - broken down by syllable] atrás [natural native speed] |
| Braden: Next |
| Sílvia: inacreditável [natural native speed] |
| Braden: unbelievable |
| Sílvia: inacreditável [slowly - broken down by syllable] inacreditável [natural native speed] |
| Braden: Next |
| Sílvia: certeza [natural native speed] |
| Braden: certainty, sureness, sure |
| Sílvia: certeza [slowly - broken down by syllable] certeza [natural native speed] |
| Braden: Next |
| Sílvia: parecer [natural native speed] |
| Braden: seem |
| Sílvia: parecer [slowly - broken down by syllable] parecer [natural native speed] |
| Braden: Next |
| Sílvia: verdade [natural native speed] |
| Braden: truth |
| Sílvia: verdade [slowly - broken down by syllable] verdade [natural native speed] |
| Braden: Next |
| Sílvia: esperar [natural native speed] |
| Braden: to wait |
| Sílvia: esperar [slowly - broken down by syllable] esperar [natural native speed] |
| Braden: Next |
| Sílvia: cinco [natural native speed] |
| Braden: five |
| Sílvia: cinco [slowly - broken down by syllable] cinco [natural native speed] |
| Braden: Next |
| Sílvia: Wow! [natural native speed] |
| Braden: Wow! |
| Sílvia: Wow! [slowly - broken down by syllable] Wow! [natural native speed] |
| Braden: Next |
| Sílvia: Uau! [natural native speed] |
| Braden: Whoa! |
| Sílvia: Uau! [slowly - broken down by syllable] Uau! [natural native speed] |
| Braden: Next |
| Sílvia: pessoa [natural native speed] |
| Braden: person |
| Sílvia: pessoa [slowly - broken down by syllable] pessoa [natural native speed] |
| Braden: And our last word is… |
| Sílvia: número [natural native speed] |
| Braden: number |
| Sílvia: número [slowly - broken down by syllable] número [natural native speed] |
| VOCAB AND PHRASE USAGE |
| Braden: Let's have a closer look at the usage for some of the words and phrases from this lesson. |
| Sílvia: The first word we’ll look at is esperar. |
| Braden: Okay, esperar is a special verb that, in English, can actually have three possible translations. Esperar can mean “to wait,” “to hope” or “to expect” depending on the context. |
| Sílvia: In the dialogue, we heard the phrase - Agora é só esperar to mean, "Now, we can only wait." But if she had said something like - Não sei mas espero que possamos ajudar, then esperar means "hope," so the translation would be "I don't know, but I hope we can help." |
| Braden: Could you break this verb down for us? |
| Sílvia: esperar |
| Braden: And one time fast. |
| Sílvia: esperar |
| Braden: What’s our next phrase? |
| Sílvia: The next phrase we’ll look at is fazer mais nada. |
| Braden: This phrase in the dialogue - Não podemos fazer mais nada literally translates to "No, we can do more nothing," but it means "We can't do anything else." There are a couple of interesting things going on here, but what we’re going to look at is the mais nada. |
| Sílvia: Literally, mais nada translates to "more nothing," but in English, it's "nothing more." Portuguese and English often do this kind of a switch with the word “more.” For example, "five more days" in Portuguese would be "mais cinco dias." |
| Braden: Could you break this down for us? |
| Sílvia: fazer mais nada |
| Braden: And one time fast. |
| Sílvia: fazer mais nada |
| Braden: And what’s our next phrase? |
| Sílvia: The next phrase we’ll look at is será que. |
| Braden: Será que is a very advanced grammar that uses the future tense to indicate an uncertainty. In this case, será que gives the feeling of "Are you sure?" or "Was it really?" or something to that effect. I’ve even seen it translated as “I wonder,” depending on the context. Okay, could you break this down for us? |
| Sílvia: será que |
| Braden: And one time fast. |
| Sílvia: será que |
| Braden: Okay, let’s take a look at the grammar point. |
Lesson focus |
|---|
| Sílvia: The focus of this lesson is agreement between verbs and nouns. In the dialogue, we heard the phrase - Com certeza. Eu sei que parece inacreditável mas é verdade. |
| Braden: Which we translated as, “Very sure. I know it seems unbelievable, but it's true.” In our last lesson, we looked at gender agreement between nouns, adjectives, and articles, and some ways they can fit together. In this lesson, we’re going to look at how verbs and nouns agree with each other. |
| Sílvia: So, we are going to examine two short questions and break them apart from the noun and examine how the noun relates with the verb. To couple it in a bit of conjugation practice, we’re only going to use the verb “ter” in the present tense. |
| Braden: What’s our first question? |
| Sílvia: Você tem sapatos? |
| Braden: And what does this mean? |
| Sílvia: Do you have shoes? |
| ‘Braden: So, we’re looking at verb agreement. The issue here is that there are two nouns and one is plural and the other is singular. Plurality and singularity affect how you conjugate the verb. So, how do you know which noun to use to direct or influence your conjugation? |
| Sílvia: Two ways. First, because that’s the only one that makes sense, and second, because in normal daily language, the noun that conjugates the verb comes before the verb, not after. In normal situations, Portuguese is very flexible, so there are literally millions of exceptions to this, but the way we speak in normal conversation, that’s the order of things going. |
| Braden: What’s our next question? |
| Sílvia: Tem alguém aqui da Alemanha? |
| Braden: And what does this mean? |
| Sílvia: Is there someone here from Germany? |
| Braden: And what are we looking at in this question? |
| Sílvia: The issue here is that the verb isn’t conjugated to any noun in the sentence. |
| Braden: This is an impersonal use of the verb “ter”. When you use “tem” to mean “there is” or “there are,” then it isn’t conjugated towards really anything. It’s kind of just a fixed form that you use. Some other verbs like “haver” and “fazer” do this too. Would it ever be “tem algumas pessoas aqui da Alemanha” with that “tem” having a circumflex to conjugate it for the plural of the “pessoas” ? |
| Sílvia: No, never ever. |
| Braden: The verb “ter”, when you conjugate it to “tem”, it doesn’t have a circumflex and it doesn’t change. It means “there is” and “there are” and it’s not connected to any specific noun within a sentence. |
| Sílvia: That’s correct. |
Outro |
| Braden: Okay, so that just about does it for this lesson! See you later! |
| Sílvia: Até mais! |
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