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Hi Orlando – another great dialog!
One question:
In the fifth line when you are doing the line-by-line analysis you and Sonia skip over the part of the sentence that says, “…,aquele ali,..”.
She says it during the dialog but it’s not translated in the English part.
This just means ‘that one there’, right?
Also, one other thing to point out – in the second line there is a typo in the word “olhando” (“olhado”).
Thanks again – these are really helpful!
Bret
Hi Bret,
The word “aí” and “alí” are interchangeable. And both refer to something that is close to the person being spoken to. A good rule of thumb: aqui = close to the speaker, aí & ali = close to the person being spoken to, lá = farther away from both the speaker and the person being spoken to. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but a pretty good general guideline. As to “aquele”, a grammar book might say that Brazilians have three adjectives: este, esse, aquele, but in everyday speech, they generally really only use two: esse and aquele. All that to say, “aquele alí” is like saying, “that one that is over near where you are.”
As to my typo, thanks, now we’ll see how lazy I am to see how long it takes me to get into it to correct it!
Orlando
This took me a long time to catch on to… but Orlando, once again… perfectly written words of wisdom! I wish I had this back when I was trying to figure out the difference between ai and la.
“A good rule of thumb: aqui = close to the speaker, aí & ali = close to the person being spoken to, lá = farther away from both the speaker and the person being spoken to.”
É isso aí meu!