Personal Details

One of the main reasons for wishing to communicate is to get to know other people and make friends. Portuguese people are very family oriented, they love talking about their family and finding out about yours.

Not only should you learn the obvious words for mother (a mae, pronounced my) , father ( o pai pronounced pie ), son ( o filho pronounced feelyoo ), daughter (filha pronounced feelya ),brother ( irmao pronounced eer-ma-oo) , sister ( irma ), grandmother , grandfather, uncle ( tio) and aunt (tia), you really will also find yourself using the vocabulary for extended family.

Do you know the word for mother-in-law or father-in-law (sogra, sogro) ? Brother-in-law or sister-in-law ( cunhado, cunhada )?

Cousins assume prime importance, everyone seems to have so many of them. A first cousin is a primo irmao, prima irma if she is feminine.

You need to be able to ask about ages and birthdays. Remember Saints' days are important too. You want to be able to talk about your hobbies and interests as well as finding out about hobbies and interests of others.

Portuguese Personal Pages on the internet are a good start when you are looking for ways to talk about yourself or your interests.

The list of personal details, hobbies and interests from Adalgisa Mendes is bright and full of useful vocabulary, birth date, star sign, favourite colours, favourite places and, of course, a saudade, a nostalgic longing for the place she misses most.

Another way of practising personal details is of course filling out forms. One basic form can be found here but unless you really intend to go on safari, I recommend you simply use it for practice.

Studying CVs is another useful way of learning how to express personal details, and very useful if you wish to produce a Portuguese CV for yourself. Advice on writing a CV in Portuguese is well presented at WorkUSA , a Brazilian site, while there are some very effective - and even unusual - CVs floating around in cyberspace.

A very trendy student home page with detalhes pessoais rather than CV material is this one from Joana Margarida . See what you make of the rather compressed spelling style. If you read it out loud, it becomes more comprehensible. Texting on mobile phones is affecting spelling world-wide.

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