Talk:Brazilian Portuguese phrasebook

What's a lan house?

One of the phrases is "a lan house", which I've never heard of. I've heard of LAN parties (a bunch of people bring computers, connect them together, and do things); is a LAN house a place where one holds LAN parties? -(WT-en) phma 22:35, 4 Oct 2005 (EDT)

Found out on Brazzil. It's like an Internet café. -(WT-en) phma 15:45, 7 Jan 2006 (EST)

A LAN house is primarily geared toward gamers who need broadband connections and usually has a dark environment (blackened windows etc) supposed to enhance the video effects of games, whereas an internet café is brighter and usually has a good printer, recordable CDs and other useful items for non-gamers. -- (WT-en) Ricardo (Rmx) 22:42, 26 January 2007 (EST)

Phrasebook

I think this page has gotten far too long to be reasonable for a travellers' phrasebook. I think the point of a phrasebook is to give a traveller just enough tools to survive their travel experience.

I don't think an extended comparison of Portuguese to Spanish serves that goal; neither do listings of US states or world nations in Portuguese. I think an exception to this last rule would be covering the major English-speaking nations (UK, USA, Canada, Australia, NZ) so people can say "I am from ____".

I've clipped out the Spanish comparison and VFD'd the geographical lists. --(WT-en) Evan 10:56, 28 Nov 2005 (EST)

• The Spanish comparison is now in Wikipedia, including the there out-of-place Boa viagem. Anyone who wants to claim that your text is CCASA and not GFDL, please go there. -(WT-en) phma 16:41, 7 Jan 2006 (EST)

Pronunciation mistakes

There are some obvious mistakes in the pronunciation section. I've corrected a few, but there are others (e.g.: the j sound is exactly as in French, i think the description is confusing and misleading). I think i can't use an account from neither "en.wikipedia" nor "pt.wikipedia", so I made anonoymous edits... Yuu_En/Yuu 15jan2006

• Thanks! You can make an account here just as you can in Wikipedia. -(WT-en) phma 08:37, 22 Feb 2006 (EST)

External links section

I removed the following external links section in following the recent trend. (WT-en) Texugo 23:20, 24 January 2008 (EST)

• Portuguese Words and Phrases
• Wikipedia -- Portuguese language
• Wikipedia -- Differences between Spanish and Portuguese
• Wikibooks -- Portuguese textbook
• Verbix online Portuguese verb conjugator
• Portuguese Online Vocabulary Lessons with Audio

Numbers

In the numbers section, I have added that 'meia' for six is only used in Brazil. In Portugal this would probably not be understood. I've made an anonymous edit to avoid having to create an account for a small edit. I hope that is okay. AMC

beef, poached eggs, rice, ..., lettuce and tomatoes

There're 3 instances of phrases like this, with a completely different translation. What each of them is intended to mean? --(WT-en) DenisYurkin 05:18, 20 September 2009 (EDT)

I clipped it and will put it here:

beef, poached eggs, rice, french fries, lettuce and tomatoes

a la minuta (...)

beef, poached eggs, rice, beans, lettuce and tomatoes

completão comercial (...)

beef, poached eggs, rice, beans, pasta, lettuce and tomatoes

completão industrial (...)

I believe these phrases are specific to Portugal (they definitely mean nothing in Brazil). I'm not sure that they are all that important in Portugal either unless you plan to have a lot of blue-collar lunch breaks. I'm leaving them here, pending further input. (WT-en) Texugo 07:35, 20 September 2009 (EDT)

So are they names of specific dishes / the way the dishes are served? Or what are they mean together? --(WT-en) DenisYurkin 10:16, 20 September 2009 (EDT)

They are, if anything, set lunches in a luncheonette type place, but I've never heard of them. Google gives basically no hits that aren't derived from the mention at Wikivoyage, so I think it is safe to delete them. (WT-en) Texugo 00:15, 21 September 2009 (EDT)

• late clarification: these terms are specific to the "gaúcho" accent. Ibaman (talk) 11:08, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

French

I removed the line "Since the sounds of French and Portuguese match more closely, you would do better to view the Pronunciation guide at French Wikivoyage." Yes, there are some of the same sounds, but they are written completely differently so the French pronunciation guide would be no help to figuring out how to pronounce written Portuguese. I may tone down some of the other parallels with French too-- they are honestly not all that similar at all. (WT-en) Texugo 01:51, 17 July 2010 (EDT)

European Portuguese guide

There are a lot of words in the European Portuguese guide that are not used at all in Portugal. Words like "trem" (train) and "ônibus" (bus) are only used in Brazil. I'm going to correct those so it doesn't generate any confusion. For example, the correct word for bus in Portugal is "autocarro" and for train is "comboio". --(WT-en) Naygro 11:15, 24 October 2011 (EDT)

Yes, please make the appropriate changes. Since the split of these articles, content has been mixed everywhere. This article should only deal with Portuguese as spoken in Brazil, while Portuguese phrasebook should focus on Portuguese as spoken in Portugal. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 12:53, 24 October 2011 (EDT)

As of May 2020, there was still a lot of unremoved "portuga" lint in this article. I hope to have removed it all by now. Ibaman (talk) 19:03, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

The Hague

• I can readily recall an anecdote, too long for the main prose but worth of digression, about Ruy Barbosa, a famous Brazilian diplomat and scholar - and an extremely pedantic highbrow one, let me tell you - from the beginnings of the 20th century. Every Brazilian schoolkid gets to read a lot about him, his exploits and ideas, since kindergarten. He supposedly made a tremendous impression and did a shiny beautiful job in a diplomatic summit at The Hague once, coming home in triumph and earning the nickname "The Hague's Eagle". The irony is, this stuck on the vernacular as Águia de Haia and not Águia da Haia as it'd be proper. As I said, too long for the main prose, but it explains why Brazilians don't really bother with The Hague's "The". Ibaman (talk) 13:17, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Portuguese obliges the gender-flexible definite article

I feel slightly bad for bringing this one up, because it reads like it was written to be free of ambiguity, but for me it raises questions:

• "gender-flexible" - so does that mean it can be either o Brasil or a Brasil, i.e. do countries not have a fixed gender? Or does it just mean that different countries have different genders, it has to be o Brasil or a China?

The answer to this kind of dictates my next question, so I'll leave that for now.--ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 09:23, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

• Yeah the gender is fixed. Brasil, Chile and Peru are always male; Argentina and Bolivia and Colombia are always female. It flexes on number too, "the" Philippines, Bahamas, Maldives and United States must always be in the plural. This part is unchanging. The definite, indefinite, possessive (etc.) articles are gender and number-flexible, that's what's meant. Don't feel bad. I'm not a native English speaker, never lived abroad, my tendency to commit slips and mistakes is bound to be eternal, I guess. Ibaman (talk) 13:19, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Okay, excellent. In that case, it would probably be clearer to take out "gender-flexible" from that sentence.

My next question: is it compulsory to use the definite article (or some deformation of it like do / no) with countries, or can you talk about the country without the article? If the former, I'm struggling to see how that is any different from French or Italian? --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 13:34, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Haha, but as a non-native, you'll never unthinkingly write "you're" "it's", or "know" when you mean "your", "its" or "no", which I do all the time.--ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 13:36, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

• to be: estou na Itália, estou na França, estou no Brasil, estou em Portugal.

• to come: Venho da França, venho da Itália, venho do Brasil, venho de Portugal.

• to go: vou à França, vou à Itália, vou ao Brasil, vou a Portugal.

• "Porto City (is located) at Portugal" can only thus be meaningfully written in simple unpolished Portuguese: O Porto (está/fica localizado) em Portugal. Verbal structures highlighted for contrast.

the gist is, with "articled (gendered)" countries and cities, you will necessarily use it, it's indeed compulsory. With the non-articled ones, you don't. Most CITIES go unarticled, though. I wish I had my French and Italian skills (and German and Russian) on par with English, and could knowingly and freely digress on this difference. AFAIK the constructions are indeed very similar. Ibaman (talk) 13:46, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Well I don't know any Italian grammar, I just know from reading that the article precedes country names. But in French, you get very similar outcomes to the examples you gave:

• Je vais en Italie, en France, au Brésil, au Portugal...
• Je suis en Italie, en France, au Brésil, au Portugal...
• Je viens du Brésil, du Portugal (m.) BUT Je viens de France, d'Italie (f.), and then for some reason Je viens du Nord de la France, de l'Italie du Sud...
• Cities either have an article (Le Mans, La Rochelle, Le Caire) or they don't (Rome, Paris, Londres)

Though I guess the point is that Portuguese isn't that unusual in assigning articles to placenames, even if the details differ somewhat. Thanks for the explanations, please let me know what you think of my revision (to be done next).--ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 15:32, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

yeah, them ol' grumpy Latin tongues, always full of nitpick and endless exceptions. You eventually learn to love how and where they always relate. Ibaman (talk) 15:42, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Phonetic approximations

• Just for the record, as I'm working to complete the phonetic bits of this article, I have made some decisions that I'd rather explain for clarity and comment. Whenever I must choose between "what's more sonically natural for the language" and "what would be easier for Anglophones to pronounce and be understood, even if retaining some of their natural accent", I will follow the latter. I'm trying as well to insert as much "tutorial" words, chosen for importance to the traveller's daily needs, sound and meaning, as possible. This is, by the way, the logic behind the (maybe mysterious) inclusion of that long list of names; IMHO every one of them is a good pronunciation tutorial for acquiring the language's sound and articulation. Ibaman (talk) 21:18, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

the English R

• "Using the English R sound in the beginning of words can cause confusion." Well, we're talking about Paulista accent here, and this must be said: in interior São Paulo and much of central Brazil, the R's are rolled on the very familiar caipira (keye-PEE-rah with Spanish "El Rey" R; redneck) accent *identically*, it's actually hilarious. If you pronounce irmão or irmã ou jantar using, say, the same R used by Brad Pitt in "dees-troyed", as Aldo the Apache from w:Inglorious Basterds, you'll sound flawlessly Brazilian interior (by the way, the same R is usual in Paraguay; Brazilian comedians abuse all these clichés). If you use this sound in the beginning of the word, it will readily mark you as heavily accented Anglophone, but chances are, you should still be understood; to pronounce caipira with the English (or the French) R is a worse "stupid gringo" joke against yourself. Ibaman (talk) 03:08, 5 May 2020 (UTC)