Flag of Portugal
I was reading a news article about the good news that the German police had a new suspect in the case of the kidnapping and disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal. A photo of a house was labelled with the Portugese words escola velho, translated as old school.
I was struck by how easy it was to recognize and remember Portuguese words.
Portuguese - English
escola vehla - old school (old school building)
Notice that both words, the noun and the adjective end in the letter a, matching.
I copied the Portuguese for old and mistyped it twice. The first time I noticed I had typed vehlo, seeing the o in the middle of the word school.
The second time I typed velha instead of vehla, transposing the h and the l. I then remembered the Yiddish, oy veh! VEH.
Finally I had the words right, escola, vehla. hl pronounced y -l like vey -lya
Later I went into Translate google and put into the English side old school and up came the translation
English - Portuguese
old school (old style, or old fashioned) - moda antigua
That reminds me of the French a la mode, at (translates into in) the fashion.
(Pie a la mode in the USA is with ice cream.)
Antigua in Portuguese reminds me of the English word antique, as in antiques shop.
Where can you use Portuguese? Over on the American continent in South America in Brazil. In Europe in Portugal. Offshore from Portugal in the Atlantic in the island of Madeira. Or as I did when reading news articles about places in Portuguese speaking countries.
About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
I and my family have lived in the UK, Spain, the USA and Singapore. I am a trave writer and phtographer and teacher of English A level and English as a foreign language.
Please come to a Toastmasters International Club where the English clubs have a langauge evaluator or grammarian. We also have French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and other language clubs based in Singapore and many more online around the world which because of Covid-19 are now meeting online.
I am President of Braddell Heights Advanced, meeting every Wednesday, on zoom the first Wednesday of the month but the other Wednesdays are workshops on app learncool.sg
Or quicker to type and easier to remember: tinyurl.com/BHACOOL
useful Websites
https://travelwithangelalansbury.blogs
https://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-to-say-thank-you-in-several.html
https://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.com/2019/05/introducing-yourself-in-english-spanish.html
https://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.com/2020/01/second-set-of-portuguese-words.html Please share links to your favourite posts
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8384769/Major-breakthrough-hunt-Madeleine-McCann-police-identify-German-suspect.html
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