How a Portuguese-To-English Phrasebook Became a Cult Comedy Sensation
As a native (Portuguese) speaker I completely understand why something like this may have appeared!<p>You must understand that we have such a small country and few foreigners bother to learn our language, even when they come to visit us. As we are a very nice bunch of people (we are, even our political revolution was made with carnation flowers [quite similar to roses], not a single bullet was shot), and we are very proud of having the oldest stable borders of all Europe (since 1180 or something like that), we are proud to be able to provide our visitors with the best possible experience. Therefore, if you don&#x27;t learn our language, we must try to communicate with you in other ways! You see, we don&#x27;t want foreigners to make fools out of themselves. I&#x27;ll give you an example: we cook almost every part of the pork, even the pork&#x27;s balls, so we don&#x27;t want you to eat &quot;tubaros&quot; (pork&#x27;s &quot;balls&quot;) without you knowing it. we also cook the intestines (bucho), so we want you to be prepared for the experience (put some lemon).<p>On a more serious note (although I&#x27;m speaking some truth above), if you only know a very small subset of the english vocabulary, you have to be creative. So you have to speak in English as you would do in Portuguese. Unfortunately it doesn&#x27;t help that the english language sometimes mixes the verb and the predicate(?) (from our perspective, of course). An example:<p>- João     - John<p>- é        - is<p>- tipo     - guy<p>- porreiro - nice<p>So &quot;O João é um tipo porreiro&quot; translates directly to &quot;The John is a guy nice&quot;. Then, when you translate &quot;to the letter&quot; local proverbs such as &quot;Quem tem língua vai a Roma&quot;, you start getting stupid things like &quot;With a tongue one go to Rome&quot; which in fact means something like &quot;He who as a tongue can go to Rome&quot; (meaning that anyone who can speak [has a tongue] can ask for directions).<p>All in all, in the end we just don&#x27;t want our visitors to eat something they&#x27;ll regret later!