Dance and Travel

  As a Portuguese learner and Brazilian culture and music passionate, I couldn’t stop noticing that some words do not have a translation in other languages. In my experience Portuguese language is charming and full of words that hold a tremendous amount of feeling and symbolism. Indeed, Brazilian culture is deeply intertwined with music, rhythm, traditions, and feelings. Some feelings and gestures do not have a translation. Here are my personal list with the 7 most meaningful words in Brazilian Portuguese that simply cannot be translated completely into English. 1 )Saudade Probably the most untranslatable Portuguese word. It is a nostalgic and profound state of melancholic longing for a person, place, a situation or anything that exists. It often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return. In English can be expressed with melancholy, longing, or nostalgia. Ex. Que saudade daquela época onde a gente ainda era criança e se divertia c...

Portuguese/Spanish Flags Although Portuguese and Spanish are closely related to the point to be somehow mutual intelligible, there are also important differences between them, which can pose difficulties for people acquainted with one of the languages who attempt to learn the other. In this article, I will focus on the Portuguese learner’s point of view that approaches to the Spanish language. He always has to pay attention to “ false friends ”: In Spanish “estar embarazada” means ‘to be pregnant’. In Portuguese “estar embaraçada” means ‘to be embarrassed’ or ‘to be entangled’. Nevertheless, Spanish has the term “embarazoso/a “meaning ’embarrassing’.’Pregnant’ in Portuguese is “grávida”. Portuguese/ Spanish False Friends: Embarazada Spanish “vaso” means ‘drinking glass ‘, while in Portuguese “vaso” means toilet (from “vaso sanitário”). A ‘drinking glass’ in Portuguese is “copo”, while Spanish “copa” is a wine glass. Here a top ten of the most frequent errors done by...

As a Portuguese learner I had soon to face the problem of learning new vocabularies. Among them it is impossible not making reference to one of the most important: “Saudade”. If you have been in Portugal or in Brazil at least once in your life, you should have heard about this feeling. Yes, because I am talking about “a feeling” which is untranslatable in other languages and that is a key word to understand the culture and the two countries as a whole. As a consequence, in this article I am going to explain the etymology of the term first, then I will try to give a definition. Finally I will propose possible translations of the word. The etymology of Saudade is controversial, however the prevailing theory affirms that it derives from the Latin Solitate which means “solitude”; from that term derives the modern for of Soledad” in Spanish and Solid ã o in Portuguese. Nevertheless, the form Saudade involves also the influences of Saudaç ã o, greeting, and Saude, health, salvat...

When I approach first the Portuguese language as Italian speaker, I was thinking to a single unitary block. I already expected some dialectal influences, in particular in Brazil, due to the fact that is composed of many federal states. However I could never expect that Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese could differ in grammatical, syntactic and lexical forms. We are not talking about British English and American English, we are talking about almost two different languages and cultures. Of course also for the people who do not know the syntactical and lexical differences, it seems to be evident the musicality of the Brazilian variant, due to the different pronunciations of the words. Pronunciations: Ex. Sauda d e, felicida d e, aon d e, d epois (“d” sound for Portuguese, while “gi” sound for Brasilian variant) Ex. Noi t e, gen t e, sen t ir  (“t” sound for Portuguese, while “tch” sound for Brazilian Portuguese) Besides, I recollect 10 different expression...

It was in 2009 the first time that heard about Portugal and it is in my heart since then . I was almost 19 and it was my first time living  far from my family. You might know that it is not so common for Italians to go to live far from their parents so early. The most of us love living at home almost till 30, someone also more than it. Anyway, I went to Genova to study and I lived in a student residence. There I met one of the most important person of my life. She was Polish and she had 7 years more than me. At that time she had already traveled a lot. For her everything started with an erasmus in 2005 in Portugal. We spent our evening talking, in English of course, and  learning, a least I have lerned a lot from her. It was a new language, a new culture, a new perspective . My first big discovery: there was someone living outside my country which could understand me much better than people from my own country . She was the first one who thalk me about Portugal and Lisbo...