I lived x I’ve lived e Outras Dicas – English Podcast #11

Depois de muita espera e de muita cobrança dos leitores finalmente chegamos à edição 11 do English Podcast. Quem ouviu as edições anteriores vai notar algumas alterações, o podcast ficou mais enxuto. Outra novidade é o podcast 100% em inglês com transcrição. Assim fica mais fácil de acompanhar e estudar. Espero que vocês gostem do novo formato.

Hoje o prof. Adir e eu conversamos sobre 4 questões enviadas pelos leitores no fórum, para um melhor aproveitamento do podcast sugiro a leitura dos tópicos listados abaixo:

* A pronúncia do artigo "a"

* Como dizer “o computador travou” em inglês

* A pronúncia do T em inglês

* I lived x I've lived: Qual a diferença?

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Transcrição do Podcast

Alessandro: Hello, everybody, welcome to another English Experts podcast and I’m joined today by my dear friend and partner Adir Ferreira. How’s it going, Adir?

Adir: Hi, Alessandro, things are great! How have you been?

Alessandro: I’ve been great and today we have very interesting topics to talk about. These topics are from the English Experts forum and I’ve picked them out because they’re questions a lot of our readers have and I thought it would be a good idea to talk about them.

Adir: Cool, let’s go for it!

Alessandro: All right, Adir, our readers have some questions about pronunciation and the first one is the pronunciation of the indefinite article “a”. Do we say “ah”, with a schwa sound or “ay”, like in the alphabet?

Adir: That’s an interesting question, Alessandro. Basically, we only pronounce it like “ay” when we are trying to emphasize or we are hesitating, for example, someone asks me what my friend was wearing and I’m not sure so I say, “Well, she was wearing a, um, red skirt, I guess.” Teachers also say “a” like “ay” when they’re dictating something for students to write. There’s been talk that higher class people say it like “ay” but that’s not the case, it’s just a matter of what you’re trying to emphasize in the sentence, it’s like when a teacher is dictating something to students in Portuguese, such as “o elefante comeu o amendoim”, in normal speak we say “u elefanti”, don’t we?

Alessandro: Ok I see. Do you think it’s an American English – British English thing?

Adir: Mmm, not really, I think it has more to do with how people speak in everyday situations, you know? So my tip is to keep an ear out to when you hear the article pronounced as “ay” and try to understand the context.

Alessandro: Adir, another question in the forum was how to say “O computador travou” in English. Well, I did some research and I came up with these expressions:

* “My computer frozed up” or “My computer locked up”.

Now, when it stops working altogether you can say:

* “My computer crashed” or “My computer died”.

And there’s even the slang expression My computer crapped out, though I wouldn’t recommend using it.

Ok, Adir, let’s move on to our next and controversial topic: the pronunciation of the letter T, the so called flap T.

Adir: Yeah, that’s a very interesting topic, Alessandro. A flap T happens when the letter T, in the middle of a word, sounds like a D. As we don’t have this sound in Portuguese, Brazilians tend to pronounce it as a trilled R, like the R in the word “camarão”, but that’s wrong,