sou ou estou? ser ou estar?

Hi. In this post I want to talk about the important difference between the verbs ‘ser’ and ‘estar’, both of which are translated into English by the verb to be. Many times, for learners of Portuguese, this is a big source of confusion, but in this post I will show you that this is a classical case of making a mountain out of a molehill.

Brazilian tongue-twisters

Hello. A tongue-twister in Brazilian Portuguese is called trava-língua. As in any other culture of the world, they are part of the oral tradition of the people and make for an important aspect of the “lore of the folk”.

Brazilian Portuguese – Lição Um – o básico

A few characteristic points of Portuguese is use of gender to distinguish between feminine and masculine nouns (there isn’t a neuter gender), different places for stress (it can fall on the last, before last, or even the before before last syllable of the word), agreement between article, noun and adjective regarding gender (feminine, masculine) and number (plural, singular). One thing that learners of the language find particularly difficult is verb conjugation. But I can assure you it is not worse than French, Italian or Spanish (after all these languages all stem from the same latin root).

Fatos Interessantes da Língua (Interesting Language Facts)

Great, we have just finished learning how to pronounce the sounds in Brazilian Portuguese. If you missed that, go back and check the two posts on Phonetics (Teach Yourself How To Pronounce Brazilian Portuguese I and II). They’re somewhere close by in this blog.

By the way, who speaks this language?

Teach Yourself How To Pronounce Brazilian Portuguese – Fonética Dois

Now that you know how to pronounce the vowels, let’s move on to the consonants.

Here they are: b, c, d, f, g, h, j, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, x, z

Also, apart from these there are also the letter ç and a few digraphs, but they are not part of the alphabet. Ç is the alter ego of C.

Teach Yourself How To Pronounce Brazilian Portuguese – Fonética Um

In this post I present you with the sounds for Brazilian Portuguese. Bear in mind that Brazil is a large country, so dialectal variations, though small, do exist, and hence the following should not be taken as a fast rule. However, if you learn to produce the sounds similar to what is explained below, you should be okay. I must say that this is somewhat simplified (on purpose) but nonetheless perfectly enough for now. You are a beginner, aren’t you?

Teach Yourself Brazilian Portuguese – Introdução

This is how I have organized the Teach Yourself posts.

Each lesson (lição) is divided into four sections:

• Vocabulary
• Grammar
• Text
• Exercises

Learn Brazilian Portuguese

I am a language enthusiast. I am very much into learning new languages. Never went into teaching though. Nonetheless, I do feel I can contribute somehow, so this post is the start of a (initially) short chain of posts that I will write on teaching Brazilian Portuguese (my mother tongue).

Well, I do not believe I can actually teach something, but who knows, you may eventually learn something from these posts.

Have fun!