MTEL Portuguese (32) cheat sheet

Phonology: Portuguese has 5 stressed vowel phonemes (/a e i o u/) plus nasal vowels (/ɐ̃ ẽ ĩ õ ũ/); European Portuguese (EP) reduces unstressed vowels to [ɨ]/[ə], while Brazilian Portuguese (BP) generally keeps them open.

Consonant rules: syllable-final /l/ is velarized [ɫ] in EP but vocalized to [w] in BP (Brasil: [bɾaˈziw]); syllable-final /s/ is [ʃ] before voiceless consonants in EP (/ʃ/), [s] in most BP.

Orthographic accents: acute (á é í ó ú) marks open vowels and oxytone/paroxytone stress; circumflex (â ê ô) marks closed vowels; tilde marks nasality (ã õ); grave marks crasis (à) and, in EP, the contracted preposition.

Verb system: three conjugations (-ar, -er, -ir), plus irregular pôr and its compounds; key tenses include presente, pretérito perfeito, pretérito imperfeito, pretérito mais-que-perfeito, futuro do presente, futuro do pretérito, and subjunctive forms.

Mood distinction: indicative states fact, subjunctive expresses doubt, desire, or hypothesis (Espero que venha); the future subjunctive (fizer, vier) appears in temporal/conditional clauses referring to the future.

Personal infinitive: Portuguese uniquely inflects the infinitive for person (para eu estudar, para eles estudarem); used when the subject differs from the main clause subject.

Noun-adjective agreement: gender (masc/fem) and number must agree; adjectives ending in -ão (alemão → alemã/alemães/alemãs) and -ês/-esa patterns require attention.

Pronoun placement: BP favors proclisis (Me dá), EP favors enclisis (Dá-me); mesoclisis occurs only in formal future/conditional EP (Dar-lhe-ei).

Lusophone diversity: EP, BP, and African varieties (Angola, Mozambique) differ in lexicon, phonology, and pronoun usage, but share the same written standard from the 1990 Acordo Ortográfico.

Reading comprehension strategy: identify cognates cautiously (embaraçada = pregnant/embarrassed false friend in BP/EP), and track referents for clitic pronouns (o, a, lhe, se).

Literary periods: Medieval troubadour poetry (cantigas de amigo/amor), Renaissance (Camões, Os Lusíadas), Romanticism (Almeida Garrett, Alexandre Herculano), Realism (Eça de Queirós), Modernism (Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Andrade).

Brazilian Modernism: Semana de Arte Moderna (1922) in São Paulo; Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma and Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago define the movement.

Lusophone African literature: Mia Couto (Mozambique) and Pepetela (Angola) blend oral tradition with Portuguese; José Saramago (Portugal, Nobel 1998) uses long sentences and unconventional punctuation.

Text genre analysis: distinguishing crônica, conto, romance, poema, and artigo de opinião by structure, length, and narrative voice.

Writing conventions: Portuguese uses « » or “ ” quotes; ordinal abbreviations (1.º, 2.ª) and date format (25 de abril de 1974) differ from English usage.

Language variation: register (formal/informal), regionalism (gíria, regionalismos), and sociolinguistic markers (você/tu, a gente) affect interpretation of texts.