Comments on: Brazinglish: Your stories …

By: Flavia Martins

Flavia Martins — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:00:04 +0000

We call the shower “box” and table mats “jogo americano” (which would translate to something like “American set”). When giving e-mail addresses, we call underscore “underline” and confuse “shit” with “sheet” in pronunciation.
I once had a student who always arrived late. She’d come in saying something that sounded more like “squeeze me” (that was fun).

But about presidents, I think the ex-president, Cardoso, is much more fun in English. I saw his interview for a TV program called “Hard Talk” (you can see it on Youtube) and to be sure, if I spoke like that I’d prefer to keep speaking Portuguese.

By: Elza Swenson

Elza Swenson — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 01:22:00 +0000

I am a Brazilian English teacher. Most of my students are from basic to upper intermediate levels. My student ‘pearl of wisdom’ happened in a first lesson of a basic evening group of adults. We were standing in a circle, throwing a soft ball and drilling “What´s your name?”- My name´s X.”, when a late new student arrived. When she realized that we were ’speaking English’on the first day, she panicked and uncomfortably joined the group. A few minutes later, she was relaxed and enjoying the lesson. Two weeks later I met her and her mum at hairdresser´s. When she introduced me to her mum she proudly said, in Portuguese of course, “Mum, this is my teacher Izelza.” The funny thing about it, is that, in fact, my name ‘iz’ Elza.

By: Fernando Guarany Jr

Fernando Guarany Jr — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:10:19 +0000

Hi, Wladimir!

A fun way to possibly practise the TH sound in English would be by “imitating” Romario (football player) when he says words like “parceiro” /partheiro/ . What do you think?

Cheers,

Fernando

By: Wladimir

Wladimir — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:32:14 +0000

As you’ll realize my English isn’t so good as the people that wrote here till now. I’ve only studied English for 3 years, but each day I’m improving, well, it is that I think. My biggest problem is pronunciation, mainly the words with /th/, like: think, with, through etc.. It isn’t common to Brazilians to use the tongue between the teeth. Always that I try to say these words for natives (American, English, etc . .) I have to repeat it three or four times until someone understands me, it’s so boring . But I challenge you that don’t speak Portuguese to say, cão (dog), avião (ariplane), revisão (review), verão (summer). Is the same thing, it sounds very weird and we’re always asking them to repeat.

By: Camila Fleming

Camila Fleming — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:04:14 +0000

It’s funny how we play with English’s words here in Brazil. We always tell some jokes that have something to do with English. There’s even one joke about our president, Lula, speaking English. If you didn’t know our president can’t speak English. Sometimes when we don’t know a word in English we just say it in Portuguese. It’s like when I once wanted to say that one person was “apelona”. It means that you care too much about something; always take things seriously when it’s just a joke. I didn’t found a word in English that has the same meaning so i said “Stop being so apelona!”
Even those who don’t know how to speak English know some word and even a phrase I’m sure almost everyone here know: “The book is on the table”, and when you ask something in English the person answer this, now you know that it’s normal.

By: Stephen Bullon

Stephen Bullon — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:39:21 +0000

Picking up on Marcos's point about Portuguese words that have come into English: etymology dictionaries list quite a few words in English that are Portuguese, and OED mentions the word Portuguese in 1,849 different entries, though often this is just when comparing forms across several languages. Still, Marmalade, pagoda, piranha, mandarin to name just a few all seem to have come into English more or less directly from Portuguese. Pagoda "probably" started out in Sanskrit and arrived in English via Tamil then Portuguese. Mandarin in the meaning of an official in the (Chinese) civil service originally came into English in 1514 from Portuguese, while the citrus fruit meaning didn't arrive in English until 1717 and came (rather surprisingly, if you ask me) from Swedish.

By: Charlie

Charlie — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:55:05 +0000

I went out with a Brazilian for many years and had a great introduction to Brazinglish. I have to say I was more than impressed when early on he told me ‘I learnt all the huge words in English first – doesn’t everyone?’
Assuming I was on to some kind of intellectual winner I thought I’d better reciprocate and learn some Brazilian Portuguese. This attempt was taken very seriously and I was sat down and taken through the ins and outs of the alphabet and the specific pronunciation of each letter depending where it was in a word.
I found out all sorts of things like an’R’ at the beginning of a word is sounded more like a british ‘H’ so Ronaldinho is actually pronounced ‘Honaldinho’ for many Brazilians.
I also learnt that ‘-de’ at the end of a word is sounded like a soft ‘-dge’.
It was only a little later on that it clicked that my lovely boyfriend had indeed done exactly what most school kids do when learning a foreign language and learnt the rude words first.