Monday, October 30, 2006

Words you should know in my country - Brazil

Brazilian has a language that it´s not so easy to pronouce, because a lot of words are "nasal", and needs to be speaken with a nasal sounds.
Words like "não" (no) and "coração" (heart) are very hard to be correclty speaken because of this.

Some words that you should know when coming here to visit me and my country:

Oi - Hi
Obrigado - Thanks
Por favor - Please
Onde fica a casa do Jock? - Where is the Jock´s house?
Desculpa or desculpe - Sorry
Quanto custa - How much


Oh, there´s a real beautiful word that only exist in portuguese, and there´s no PERFECT translation in any other language in the world: saudade.

It can be poorly translated as:

Inglês - "Homesickness" (but it´s only used when you miss the city where you were born), or you can say "I miss you" when you feel "saudade".
Alemão - "Homesickness";
Espanhol - "Nostalgia" or something like "echado(a) de meno".
Frances - "Nostalgie";
Árabe - "حنين للوطن";
Grego - "νοσταλγία για την πατρίδα";

This words doesn´t have a correct meaning of "saudade", but it´s something like that.


And the last word that I must comment, which I won´t translate here, has a great sound when pronounced. It´s very famous all over the world because of the brazilian women stereotype: BUNDA. :)


3 Comments:

Blogger Mo said...

Olà Jock I'm just back from a holiday in Portugal and loved the sound of Portuguese - I know it's pronounced a bit differently in Brazil though. I tried out the very few words I know but would love to learn more.

12:13 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yes, it´s a little bit different, but we can understand each other perfectly!

5:36 PM  
Blogger Rebelde said...

I can understand a little portuguese and I always thought it has its own ritm, which I fouond very appealing, it probably has to do a lot with the whole "brazilian attitude": always happy, always enjoying life

6:01 PM  

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