Posts from November 2007

o-globo-online.png” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.A great way to stay on top of the latest Brazilian events, while keeping up with your Portuguese!

There isn’t much to explain here; O Globo is a hugely popular newspaper in Brazil which is always worth reading. You can check it out online to get Brazilian news headlines quickly and easily.

For those of you who use RSS to read your news and website updates, check out this amazing page where Globo has its RSS feeds broken out by category. Example: Just curious about the Brazilian economy? This feed is for you!

Tags: , , , ,

baleia_br.jpgA minke whale was discovered recently in the middle of Brazil, a thousand miles from the ocean. An epic story ensued…

On the 16th of November, an intrepid minke whale was found deep in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. The whale had swam up tributaries of the second longest river in the world, and had become beached in the state of Pará. Many locals showed up to help biologists and veterinarians get the whale back into the water. Subsequently the whale disappeared, swimming further into the forest…

Após ser desencalhada por biólogos, veterinários e ribeirinhos, no final da tarde desta quinta-feira, 15, a baleia Minke desapareceu. Ela, que foi dada como morta em informações preliminares, que acabaram não se confirmando pelo Ibama, fez uma viagem de quase 1,5 mil quilômetros, do oceano Atlântico até o meio da floresta amazônica. Segundo biólogos do Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis (Ibama), o animal pode estar subindo o rio Tapajós, um afluente do Amazonas, no oeste do Estado, na tentativa de chegar ao oceano, mas os especialistas temem que ele não consiga sobreviver fora do habitat natural.

thanks to Alessandro for the audio

Here’s a BYKI List that you can download for Windows or Mac OS X, again with Alessandro’s help. Here’s the raw audio of the words in the list. Enjoy!

Read More »

hunt.jpg
Celebrating the release of BYKI Gold Portuguese and the first 7 months of the Portuguese Blog, we offer you, our reader, a fun challenge!

See if you can find the answers to the following questions and email me your answers at codonnell [at] transparent.com

  • Name a type of drum used by samba schools.
  • Why do Brazilians speak Portuguese (short answer is fine).
  • How do you say ‘red’ in Portuguese?
  • Name a band from Rio de Janeiro.
  • What does ‘cueca’ mean?
  • What word do you use to confirm and appointment or social obligation?
  • How do you say ‘thank you’ in Japanese?
  • What is a common spelling of ‘cheeseburger’ in Brazil?
  • Name another Portuguese -speaking country other than Portugal and Brazil.
  • Where is the 2014 World Cup to be held?
  • Name two Brazilian holidays.
  • Voce ja foi a Bahia?
  • Name a site that you use to learn Portuguese.
  • What is one difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese?
  • Name a Brazilian song.
  • Name a neighborhood in a Brazilian city.
  • What URL (web page address) will keep you up to date on the sites I bookmark?
  • How do people in Sampa say ‘Dude?’
  • When is Brazilian Independence Day?
  • How/Where can you listen to Brazilian radio on the internet?

The reader who answers the most questions correctly, and emails me their responses by December 3rd, 2007, will receive a FREE copy of BYKI Gold Levels 1 and 2 Bundle for Mac or Windows!! (In the event of a tie, we will draw a winner’s name from a hat)

What is BYKI Gold?

Great question. As you may know, BYKI is the terrific software made here at Transparent Language for learning foreign language. We offer a free Lite version in 64 languages, with an upgrade option to the Deluxe, with more features and content, for $39.95.

The Gold project grew out of experimenting with new content concepts for BYKI, and I was lucky to be part of the team that put this exciting new content set together! It was an interesting and engaging challenge, and I am pleased to give the product my personal endorsement.

BYKI Gold is different from BYKI Deluxe in three ways; it is:

  • Culturally focused
  • Phrase and scenario based
  • Progressive in its learning style

It starts at the beginner level, with casual conversation terms like ‘Tudo Bom?’ and works its way up to sentences with advanced tenses and vocabulary. The product was designed to be EASY the whole way through.

I am really curious to hear what you all have to say about it. As you can see we offer the first 11 lists for free, so you can give me feedback even if you aren’t interested in continuing the course, since the product follows the same pattern from the beginning to the end.

Below are the different ways you can get BYKI Gold. We offer a great discount; the bundle (Levels 1 and 2) is just about the best language-learning value in the world, no exaggeration.

melhor.jpgThe Portuguese Blog is getting a whole lot better

There are several very exciting pieces of news regarding this blog:

  • A very exciting quiz-based contest to celebrate six months of Portuguese blogging and our new Portuguese BYKI Gold product
  • Streamlined design of the site to allow easier navigation
  • The launch of the Portuguese Blog Podcast on iTunes.
  • The announcement of other language blogs published by Transparent Language
  • If you’re lucky…. a sneak peek at BYKI 4.0! It is incredible, trust me.

Much of this is already underway, and I am very excited. Yesterday’s post was the first of a new style that I will try to do at least once a week. In addition to providing you wonderful and loyal readers great resources, tips and other sites to visit, we plan to really expand the amount of Portuguese native speaker sound in the blog posts. This is part of an effort on my part to provide more relevant, accessible, and entertaining language resources.

Though the links were broken in yesterday’s email (eesh sorry; growing pains!), the post (about the Brazilian Oil Discovery) is available here. Let me know what you think about the resource format! My goal is to give casual readers the headlines and interesting takeaways right at the front, with more commentary, Portuguese-language text and audio with translations, and vocabulary lists with native speaker sound. Don’t worry, it’s all still free!! :-)

Read More »

OilDiscovery.jpgBYKI Web List and Podcast audio included below

JACKPOT!

You know that feeling when you find a $20 bill on the street? Pretty great, right? Ok now imagine finding a hundred billion dollars.

That is essentially what happened to Brazil last week, when the national oil company Petrobras stumbled upon an undiscovered underwater oil reserve holding between 5 and 8 billion barrels of oil by their estimation. This find alone equals about 40% of the total volume of oil ever found in the entire country.

This addition to Brazil’s oil reserves will catapult the country to the top ten oil producers in the world, somewhere around number 8.

Read More »

Back to the Top