I’m on summer vacation (lol, I’m 36) after my first Portuguese language class, which means it’s up to me to not fully encapsulate myself in an English-speaking bubble until classes resume in Setembro. So far so good, I think. Continuous eavesdropping, watching the news in Portuguese and listening to António Variações on repeat seems to help. This is the first time I’m able to use music as a passive way to build listening comprehension and pronunciation skills, and I’m pretty stoked about it. *a single water droplet falls onto sleeping tree frog* “Anyway, it’s getting late…” Scroll through these mostly unrelated textbook doods to the end for a very special flea market comic.
The “this, that, that over there” thing is always a weird one, since we don’t have a third singular word in modern English for “that over there, equally distant from both of us.” I remember finding this absolutely wild when studying Japanese (これ (this ~), それ (that ~), あれ (that ~ over there)) in college. It feels like speaking in code, so I was chuffed to see it exists in Portuguese too, although I’m realizing there are tons of hidden messages built into the Portuguese language (more on this soon).
I stopped studying Spanish in high school (sigh), but like R&B lyrics from the early aughts after a few beers in Mexico, there seems to be quite a bit kept in the vault. Sometimes it feels like the brain awkwardly offers the Spanish word I forgot about years ago instead of the Portuguese one I learned last week. When I asked my professor if I was really somehow learning Spanish too, she basically said yeah, probably.
She explained that Portuguese has all the sounds of Spanish and more (like nasal vowels/consonants), and since the two are intrinsically linked as romance languages, there is a ton of overlap. A great example of this is the verb to have, which is ter in Portuguese and tener in Spanish. “I have, you have, she has, we have” conjugates in Portuguese as “eu tenho, tu tens, ela tem, nós temos,” and in Spanish, it’s “yo tengo, tu tienes, ella tiene, nosotros tenemos” – so yeah, by no means “the same language,” but it does seem like someday Spanish will be somewhat easy to finally pick up.
I did manage to preserve my very first fully Portuguese conversation with a stranger in comic form. I think you’ll be able to get the gist of the interaction even if you aren’t learning Portuguese. After nearly two years of the most fragmented connection to humanity, I 100% drew this in my sketchbook in one go, with tears in my eyes. I felt so jazzed and hopeful after this. I really did not need those extra cups though.
Interested in explorin’ and enjoyin’ some random stuff in the mostly Portuguese music world? I’ve put together a small list of 10,000 links below.
Big obsession with António Variações after watching this beautiful but heart-wrenching biopic about him (thorough trailer here). The Portuguese singer/songwriter died in ’84 before his very Bowie-feeling career had a chance to take off, leaving only two (good) albums and then a solid third collection released after his death. There are some seriously tender moments in the film between the actor playing António and Filipe Duarte, the formerly living actor whose character I hope [redacted] looks like when he’s old.
The web describes Portuguese Pimba as “a genre of music with an uptempo style and corny romantic or saucy and vulgar lyrics and often associated with poorly educated public from rural areas, suburban poor or working-class neighborhoods.” I can’t think of anything I could follow that up with other than.. I’m in. José Pinhal is one of my favorites so far.
Fita Magnética is a cassette tape library and archive initiative here in Porto finding and preserving forgotten recordings and hidden gems on magnetic tape - I love this project a ton, more please!
I imagine this (Brazilian) song plays every time I hit send on this newsletter
beijinhos!
-A