Portuguese · Chapter 6 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
Cabeça, coração, mão
The body from head to foot, then the feelings Portuguese keeps in it, and why a Brazilian has hunger and fear rather than being hungry or afraid.
Practise this lesson
18-word session
A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.
Worth knowing
The body and the feelings in Brazilian Portuguese
The body words are concrete and mostly regular. The feeling words are where Portuguese starts doing things differently from English, and the difference is worth seeing early.
From the top down
is body. is head and is hair, and is a mass noun: a whole head of it is still singular, o . is face. is eye and is mouth. is hand and is foot.
is feminine despite ending in -o: a , as . Along with , it is the classic exception to the masculine -o rule, so learn it with its article.
is heart, both the organ and the thing people break. is blood.
Pain and illness
is pain, and Portuguese attaches it to the body part with : is a headache, literally pain of head. is ill.
Portuguese uses the definite article for body parts where English uses a possessive. a is he raised his hand, and adding would sound odd, because whose hand else would it be?
Having a feeling rather than being one
This is the important bit. English says I am hungry, I am afraid. Portuguese says I have hunger, I have fear.
...: I am afraid of ...
is hunger and is fear. Brazilian speech prefers the form for a passing state, which is most hunger and most fear.
is to feel. It also means to be sorry about, so is I am very sorry. Reflexive, -, it describes how you feel: me .
States that are adjectives
is happy and is sad. Both end in -z or -e and so do not change for gender: , . is alone, and it does change: for a woman.
Put together, these let a learner say where it hurts and how they feel about it, which covers a surprising amount of real conversation.