Sunday, May 27, 2018

How to remember a Portuguese word. Like morango is strawberry




Problem
I have been learning Portuguese for a trip to Madeira but could not remember that morango was Portuguese for strawberry. The Portuguese word looked like mango or orange.

I got it wrong several times on the language learning games on the app Duolingo on my phone. I was halfway towards remembering. But a translation is either right or wrong.

I knew when I saw the Portuguese word morango that it was a fruit, a berry. It had to be either raspberry or strawberry. But which?

I looked at the letters again, hoping for a link, a clue. The letters ra are in both strawberry and raspberry. 

Where in the words morango and strawberry? The letter r has third place.  The letter a is fourth. It looks like _ _ r a...  So moRAngo is stRAwberry and stRAwberry is moRAngo.

How do I remember that the first two letters of the Portuguese are MO ? How do I remember that the last three letters are NGO? More strawberry, one more and g.

Strawberry meringue - Pavlova, picture from Wikipedia, photo author Hazel Fowler.

I told a member of my family this. They replied: I'd remember it from 
strawberry meringue. Morango.

If you have a problem, just ask somebody else. even if they don't care about your problem and you and they think they don't have an answer. Sometimes just repeating the problem means that the answer will pop into somebody's head. 

The same applies to any language learning and any travelling. In the next post I will tell you about a problem solved on my trip to Japan.

Useful websites
Portugal tourist board
duolingo to learn Portuguese for free for use in Brazil or Portugal or Madeira. See my other posts on Portuguese, Portugal, Madeira.
Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer. I have many more interesting posts on learning Portuguese and other languages. Please share links to your favourite posts.

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