While travelling, read or write comic poetry

Problem
How to rest from stress when travelling or stopping for lunch.


Answers
1 Read comic poetry.
2 Write comic poetry.

If you wite comic poetry, you have comic poetry to read. A year later you will have forgotten what you wrote. So you can read it again.

USEFUL WEBSITES
http://comicpoemsbynutter.blogspot.com/2018/07/love-is-like-cuckoo.html
http://comicpoemsbynutter.blogspot.com/2018/07/warm-feelings-about-worms.html

Photo by
Per Harald Olsen
In Wikipedia Cuckoo

Portuguese words for good fish sandwich snack

Problem

Portuguese for Brazil is similar to Portuguese for Portugal and islands such as Madeira which was a shipping stop in the Atlantic. Madeira wine gets its name from the wine which heated up during transport and was fortified to protect it during the sea journey. Portuguese is easy to learn if you speak English and more so as it is similar to Spanish and Italian and the root romance language, Latin. How do you remember words you have just learned from Duolingo, the free language learning ap?

Answer

Find a hook to hang the word on. Then repeat the reminder to yourself all day and every day until the word is firmly in your memory. No time or energy for that? Never mind. I find that when I come back to repeat a half-done lesson or revision, the word comes to mind much faster than it did when I first learned it.

English - Portuguese

food - comida (ah - food) (if you prefer a word ending in o, to match food, use alimento like the alimentary canal in your body) 

good - bom as in Bombay (Now Mumbai)

kitchen - cozinho (like cuisine, with an H like kitchen, ends with Oh! excitement, mouth open as you walk into the kitchen and see the cuisine)

pasta - massa - I eat a mass of pasta

snack - lanche (like light lunch, snack lunch)

fish - peixe (i before e in English except in fish pe, fish pee, pe, ixe, start and end with vowels e peixe, x in the middle of the word like fish fins)

sandwich - sanduiche (almost the same but change the w to u, just like the w sound but shortened in shape)

Verbs

I drink - bebo (like imbibe)

I eat  - como (I eat)

I like - gusto de (have a liking for, de is of or for)

I write - escrivo

Portuguese

The o ending goes with I just like the Latin. At school I learned Latin, amo, amas, amat, meaning I love, you love, he, she or it loves.

amo (Latin for I love)

bebo - I drink (Portuguese for I drink)

comida - food

escrivo - I write

eu - I

gusto - I like (add de before a noun, rather like our English phrases I have a fancy for, liking for)

lanche - snack

pesce - fish

sanduiche - sandwich

Author

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. I have several posts on Portugues and Madeira. Please read, bookmark and share links to your favourite posts. Thank you.

How to remember 23 Portuguese words - or any foreign language

Flag of Portugal. From Wikimedia Commons.

Problem
I am learning Portuguese. I need a working vocabulary of about 300 words, which I can do in a month if I learn ten a day. I need to practise every day or I will forget the words.

Answer
The simple solution is to keep the word list on a page in my diary. I write the foreign word first, then the English translation.

Alphabet Letters
I list the letters of the alphabet down the left hand side. How many lines do I have? I have 26, enough for one line per letter of the alphabet. (In theory if I know there are few words, an few I need to know, starting with x, y, z, or any letter that language does not use, I could drop that letter or put two on one line, leaving space for a each use letter, such as c in French or S in English.

I started with the letters of the alphabet at the beginning of the line, but I was short of space. So I wrote over the letters, making the initial letter in the margin. When I started the next page, for German, I had the system more condensed.

Margin
Now the initial letters are in the margin. I write as close as I can get to the edge of the page.

Saving Space
I started by repeating the letters, leaving the initial letter separate. However, now I use it to start the first word.  So instead of
A agua - water
b boa / bom - good
c carta - letter

I write
agua - water
boa / bom - good
carta - letter

Save Space With Dots
The hyphens between the Portuguese and the English were taking up too much space. I changed the line for a dot.

agua.water
boa.good
carta.letter

In this blog post I am not so short of space. I also want to make the words easier to read. Therefore here I am sticking to the hyphens.

If the word is the same in English I write the letter s in brackets.
pizza (s) 

Why Not Capitalise Initial Letters?
I could write
Agua
Boa
Carta

However, I have been trained as a sub-editor to use small letters to start words in dictionaries. That way the reader knows when a word always starts with a capital letter.

Folding
The page is narrow and I need all the space I can get. I fold the page in half vertically and then in half again. So I now have four columns.

Four across by 25 down makes space for 100 words on a page.

Here are my first 23 Portuguese words with my memory aids:
(Only 20 are listed in this blog post under labels because the limit is 20 labels)

agua - water (like aquaduct)
abacaxi - pineapple (P and B sound and look almost the same. AP - pineAPple - apple pine, pine apple, cut it down with an axe - ee! I might not remember translating from English to Portuguese, but I am well on the way to remembering it when I see it written on a menu in Portugal or Madeira)
boa / bom - good (As in Bombay. Good bay. How do I remember it's good and not beautiful. If it's beautiful it's good.)
carta - letter, a carta or uma carta is a letter. (How do I remember 'a carta', feminine? I visualise a lady writing a letter.)
com - with / to / by
de - of
é - is
ele - he / him / it
eles - they
eu - I
falamos - we speak
gosto - (I) like
jornal - newspaper (o / um jornal) (like the French journal but drop the u, just as the Americans drop the u from British English c o l o u r and make it c o l o r.)
lê - you read
leio - I read (I remember: Add i for I, + O for I as in Latin Amo amas amat meaning I read, you etc)
livro - book
menino - boy (I remember men, but little ones, o as in boy for masculine)
mulheres - women
nós - us / we
um - a / one / some
você - you (I remember vous with v in French. V looks like Y.) 

Other useful posts:
http://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/port-and-portuguese-wine-labels-and.
http://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/how-to-ask-for-food-and-drink-in.
http://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/learn-your-first-ten-words-in.
http://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/how-do-you-say-please-in-portuguese-is.

visitportugal.com

visitbrasil.com

http://www.visitmadeira.pt/en-gb/homepage

duolingo.com

earwormslearning.com

http://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/polyglot-poem-by-angela-lansbury.html

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker, learner and speaker of many languages (a polyglot). Please bookmark and share links to your favourite posts. I have several more on Portuguese, Spanish, German, Chinese, Hebrew and other languages and countries.

Reading and writing Italian

scrivere - to write (as in scribe, scribble, scripture, describe, subscribe, inscribe)

The letters b and v are close together in many languages, such as Russian and Hebrew

io scrivo - I write

read is leg ... as in illegible, unreadable

sola - alone, as in solitary or solo

Angela Lansbury, writer and teacher