Squid Or Onion Rings?

Shortly after arriving in Portugal, I went shopping and bought a bag of what I believed to be onion rings. They weren't. They were squid rings. They looked like onion rings on the bag, but for a staunch vegetarian like me the distinction between squid and onion is an important one.  It was only after I started cooking them and my wife subsequently said, "There's a funny smell coming from the oven" that I realised my mistake. It's not the first time that I've been to the shops and returned with something that I later found out to be something completely different to what I initially thought it was. Even back in England I was prone to buying chicken soup thinking it was mushroom, because I wasn't paying enough attention and the colouring on the labels is often similar! So, anyway, the whole "squid or onion" thing only served to emphasise to me that I needed to be able to read the words on the packets if I was to prevent myself making the same mistake again. Since then the walls of my kitchen have been steadily acquiring a new wallpaper of A4 sheets of handwritten lists of nouns and conjugations of verbs in a vain attempt to help me learn Portuguese. I sticky-taped up a couple more this morning entitled, "Useful Joining Words" and "Family"

In fact, there are many Portuguese words that, without any knowledge of Portuguese, are so similar to the English spelling that one could easily be fooled into thinking that learning Portuguese is a piece of cake. It's not, but lets put that thought to one side for a moment. Consider the Portuguese words "informação" and "educação" for example. A person could be quite happy in assuming (and in this case, correctly) that these words are "information" and "education" without batting an eyelid. Seemingly dropping the "tion" and replacing it with "ção" works for thousands of words and at this point on my Portuguese language learning curve I would be quite happy to guess that the Portuguese for "pronunciation" is in fact simply "pronunciação", if it were not for fear of the embarrassment of being wrong. (I'll go and check it in a few minutes!)

Anonas Fruit.

Moving on. To Market! Saturdays and Wednesdays are market days in Cascais and the market is a very lovely and vibrant place to shop. So much nicer than a trip to the supermarket. And having been here for a few months now I kind of know most of the Portuguese names for the fruit and vegetables that I buy, even if sometimes I struggle to pronounce them properly. And I did say most. I came across a new fruit last week that I'd never seen before called Anonas, which I promptly looked up on the Internet upon returning home. I think that next week I may even buy some, after all, I do preach to my children that it is good to try new things. Anyway, the market stall holders never seem to mind if my pronunciation is terrible, as long as I buy their veggies! And this in itself presents a small problem in trying to learn a new language, in that my pronunciation is never going to improve unless my mistakes are pointed out in the first place. I'm not at all certain which vowel of the word "Anonas" to place the stress on, or whether the final "S" is pronounced "S" or "SH" although my Portuguese instinct tells me to say "anOnash". Only time will tell, when the stall holder gives me that oh so familiar quizzical look when I try and buy some.

So anyway, I've just been and made myself a lovely cup of tea and happened to walk past the bookcase with the dictionary on. And I was wrong! A right royal slap in the face from the powers that be! I did say that learning Portuguese wasn't easy and, just to prove me wrong, fate had me pick a word where the "ção" thing does not hold true! The correct translation, for anyone who is genuinely interested, is "pronúncia".

This revelation does neatly bring me on to what I was building up to though. (Just trying to salvage something from fate's terrible blow!) In my dictionary there is a section with blue pages of useful stuff, such as numbers, weekdays, and, the section I want to talk about, False Friends. This is a small, but certainly not definitive, list of words that sound alike or are spelled similarly in both languages but have different meanings. You certainly don't want to be asking for 3 metres of "fábrica" unless you want to rent a small area of factory and it could turn out to be quite embarrassing getting through busy shop doors if you were mistakenly pushing on the door labelled "Puxar" (pronounced "Poo-shar") which means "Pull". "Esperto" does not mean expert, "locação" does not mean location, "êxito" does not mean exit. And the list goes on. And on. And then, of course, there are literally thousands of words in the Portuguese language that have no similarity whatsoever to the English translation.

However, everything I've said so far pales into insignificance compared to the bug bear of learning any new language - verbs. Now I grew up and went to school in England of the 80's and as a consequence didn't really study grammar. I'll try refrain from climbing up onto some political soapbox for a jolly good rant, but suffice to say that at the time I really didn't think much about it, being only a child, but now my homeland's pedagogical politics of the of 80's is coming back with a vengeance to bite me on the bum. If only I understood a little about Imperfect Subjunctives, Past Participles and Personal Infinitives I'd have a starting point. But I don't. So I keep on having to look them up. Then I have to translate "Past Participle" and "Pluperfect" into Portuguese, because of course, my Portuguese verb book naturally lists these things in Portuguese. And finally I have to try and conjugate the verb I'm trying to learn and figure which version to use when. By this time I've usually forgotten what a Future Subjunctive is and have to start all over again. Why, oh why won't these things stay in my head? I'm sure they will eventually. They need to. And there is another of our False Friends, the verb "to need", which in Portuguese is "precisar". Confused? Precisely! But as the saying goes, practice makes perfect.

So learning Portuguese is not a piece of cake. But talking of cake, take biscuits, which in Portuguese is bolachas (pr. bolashash). Now if I tell you two more Portuguese words, "bola" and "bolo", one of which means ball and the other cake, which one would you guess means cake? Of course you probably saw right through my little game, but doesn't that seem the wrong way round to you?