The fifth day of the speedrun has arrived and we can already consider ourselves proud of not having given up. We are already strong enough to correct our first day’s mistakes and to start learning by analysing a song’s lyrics.
Morning Routine Listening Practice
On my way to work I listened to a new video, this time about making good TCC presentations. I have no idea of what TCC is, but I now know how to make a good presentation with it. What is important is that we learnt to find time for our learning habits in our daily routine, so that it fits without forcing.
What I did was taking a notebook and writing down all the new words and phrases I could recognise and that I still haven’t put on my vocabulary and the result was surprisingly good: 52 entries!
Once I finished my working day, I tried to use my memory to recall all the words I had noted down and this time the result was a bit disappointing. I could only recollect 10 words out of 52.
Is my memory that bad? Maybe. Or maybe I had been too ambitious since hours had passed since I had listened to the video.
We’ll leave those 42 other entries aside for the moment.
Reading comprehension
Let’s move to a new exercise that will start to make us acquainted with the orthograph of Portuguese: reading and translating a song’s lyrics. Since day 4 was shame-day, today we will keep walking that same path by taking once again that summer hit that we first looked at on the very first post of this speedrun.
The song is Ai se eu te pego and these are the lyrics:
Nossa, nossa
Assim você me mata
Ai, se eu te pego
Ai, ai se eu te pego
Delícia, delícia
Assim você me mata
Ai, se eu te pego
Ai, ai, se eu te pego
Sábado na balada
A galera começou a dançar
E passou a menina mais linda
Tomei coragem e comecei a falar
I mean… I knew the text wasn’t a profound philosophical essay, but… It’s basically these 3 stanzas repeating and we can see that only 29 words are used, and one is a simple interjection. And there is litterally no storytelling, no beginning and no end.
That’s because people don’t need such things, when they go to the balada, they simply want to get to that thing as soon as possible and with the least effort: “tomei coragem e comecei a falar” means “I took courage and started talking”. We don’t know what follows, but judging by the previous part where he behaves like a hopeless pervert, we might guess that a menina mais linda slapped him in the face. And yet the joyful vibes of the song force our minds to think that it went well for him and many couples had their first kiss on this song.
I should stop analysing that song now, because it really has a creepy vibe.
At least I have discovered the difference between tomar and pegar, by searching on the net.
Plus, we can see that there is no <n> in <comecei> and we already start to get an idea of how the past is formed for the first person singular.
I was also surprised about the fact that it’s <assim> and not <asi>. As an Italian native speaker my ability to recognise nasal sounds is not always good. As a matter of fact, nasal sounds are the sounds that challenge me the most in my daily life in France. Hopefully this challenge will help me improve on this.
Saving the vocabulary
Now that we did enough exercise for the day, we can recap everything by writing down all the words we learnt in our Google Sheets tab. But before, let’s check the correct ortograph of all the words, to make sure that everything we are learning is correct. We can use Google translate for that, but when uncertain double check on a more reliable online dictionary. Google Translate has actually improved a lot and it provides a good pronunciation tool, which makes it even more useful. .
By the end of day 5, I am now at 114 words. I couldn’t add all the words and phrases I had recognised in the video for the simple fact that for some of them I need to advance more in my quest, learning more grammar rules. But those words are not there just for show – though they really help boosting our brain’s morale – we should also read them everyday at least once per day, to keep track of our progression and to consolidate them in our head, so that when the time comes, we can effectively use them in a real life conversation.
Stay tuned for day 6! See you tomorrow!