48 Comments This discussion is locked.
Uh oh, I'm nonbinary, what do I say? Maybe say "obrigada" if I want to emphasize I'm more feminine than my appearance suggests, and hope that people don't think I'm just an American making a grammatical mistake?
In Portuguese there is no gender neutral, you have to use one or another...
Isn't it possible to use a variant of "agradeço" (because as a verb form it is not inflected for gender)? Also "valeu" is an informal possibility.
Yes. It's perfectly possible to use "non-adjective" expressions for thanking people.
"Valeu" is pretty ok in Brazil, informal but not seen as a bad thing.
"(Eu) agradeço" (I thank you) is also a good one :)
And even if you are a woman, you can still say "obrigado!" as an interjection. That can be accepted and is not so weird. The opposite, though, a man using "obrigada" will be frown upon.
The problem is that she does not want to use words determined by gender, which in any Latin language is almost impossible, unless she carries a dictionary with her...
Haha that's what some people say about "male" or "female" but I don't buy into that. =)
I could alternate, or I could just leave the vowel off, half the time people ellide the syllables anyway in actual conversations. I'd be curious though if there is a convention that any nonbinary people have been adopting.
They are saying "Obrigadx" in order to not determine gender! But, of course, it's informal. If you use in a test, it won't work...
Well.... one can't actually "say" obrigadx, but they are starting to write like that on the internet.
(Something totally new that cannot be accepted on Duolingo yet :) )
Here's the longer explanation. The literal translation of "obrigado" is "obliged" and because it is an adjective it has to agree with gender; in this case the ending changes from 'o' for masculine agreement to 'a' for feminine agreement. Because you are using the adjective to describe yourself then you must use a different ending depending on whether you are a man or a woman as Riley has already explained much more succinctly.
[Added later] Many discussions disappear quickly here. Here's one I dug up on this topic: http://www.duolingo.com/comment/60688
"obrigado" is even "forced" in a moral way (=I feel like I'm forced to return the favor) In French obligé/obligee (Je suis son obligé(e)) and the French word became "obligee" in English.
Thanks for the explanation. Weirdly enough, my portuguese colleague says the ending depends on whether you are thanking a man or a woman. Now I'm confused... but what you say makes more sense to me.
I can understand your confusion because you would expect a native speaker to know best. This article is in Portuguese and the writer basically says what I say, but some of the commentators disagree and agree with your friend instead: http://emportuguescorrecto.blogs.sapo.pt/4029.html.
Here is another viewpoint: http://www.flip.pt/Duvidas-Linguisticas/Duvida-Linguistica.aspx?DID=1008. This seems to be the most authoritative one. It repeats what I say, but adds that "obrigado" can also be thought of as an interjection and therefore can be used by both men and women alike.
Ask your colleague to look at these pages and see if she is swayed by their arguments. I'm sticking with my simple rule.
Thanks for your very quick answer! Hehe, my level of portuguese is at "Olá, eu sou uma mulher e eu gosto de abacaxi. A borboleta escreve um livro. Parabéns! Tchau!" but it's very flattering that you would think I could understand a whole article in portugues :D Maybe it's a regional thing, as my friend is from Madeira. But I'll stick to your rule, I think :)
Google is your friend. When I'm faced with a page of dense Portuguese I'll often cheat and paste the URL into Google translate. The little knowledge of Portuguese I've picked up here helps me untangle some of the gibberish that Google occasionally produces (it is easy to see the original Portuguese in a popup), but even without that refinement you'll usually be able to get the gist. In fact, Google's Chrome browser on a desktop computer detects the page language and offers to translate it with a single click of your mouse.
When you know what "obrigado/obrigada" means, the more logical is too agree the gender with yourself, not the person you want to thank. I don't know if Portugal has its own Royal Academy for the language, I didn't find an official site as for other language (Someone knows where we can find official rules?), but every site I checked with Portuguese lessons, explain that it has to agree with the person who speak. Ex: http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/obrigado.htm
I believe there are misusage of the language, as for every language, but it's not the official rules.
O português do Brazil é diferente do de Portugal principalmente as pronúncias
Well, what happens is that not even all the natives know their own language rules. Grammatically, the right is: men say obrigadO and women say obrigadA. But no one will judge you or laght of you if you say obrigadO being a woman or obrigadA being a man. Cheers.
Your colleague might be right. Duolingo's Portuguese is the Brazilian one. There are things that change between it and the European Portuguese.
Once I saw a Portuguese man getting offended here because a Brazilian man said that "mais pequeno" is wrong and people might think you are illiterate if you say it instead of "menor". While this is true in Pt-Br, "mais pequeno" is the standard in Pt-Eu according to the first man.
I think your colleaue is write... in Spanish its whether you are speaking TO a male or femal. It's not whether you ARE a male or female.
So women say "Obrigada" and men say "obrigado", but what if i want to say "WE thank you" and we are a mixture of males and females, what should i say?
Technically, "Obrigados" for an all-male or mixed group and "Obrigadas" for an all-female group, but these forms appear to be little used in Brazil. See: http://www.normaculta.com.br/obrigado-ou-obrigada/
See the link previously mentioned by PERCE_NEIGE which covers this point and gives some alternative ways of saying thank you in this case: http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/obrigado.htm
Just a coincidence. While they sound alike, and have similar use, Arigatou dates far before the Portuguese ever came to Japan. Also, the meanings differ slightly. Arigatou merely means thank you, while the litteral meaning of obrigado is "obliged", used as in "I'm obliged (to return the favor)". Wikipedia mentions this in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Portuguese_origin
Won't it be a good idea for DL to use a Male voice for obrigadO and a female voice for obrigadA? Will save time and people can learn intuitively! :D
A portuguese speaker told me that men say obrigado to women and men, but women have to say obrigadA to women and obrigadO to men. Is this right?
No. At least in Brazilian Portuguese, the formal rule says men must use "obrigado" and women, "obrigada", but if you are a woman and use "obrigado" in everyday life, nobody is going to bat an eye on you. Now, when a man uses "obrigada", most people assume he's gay.
Qual a diferença entre "Thanks" e "Thank you", percebi que quando se exclama "!" uso o Thanks e quando não exclama usa o "Thank you", faz sentido minha observação?
"Thanks" é mais informal. Você não precisa usar exclama, mas as vezes nós usamos para contrabalançar a informidade.
"Thank you" é mais formal. E "thanks" é como um rapido "obrigado". Nós dizemos " brigado" é igual ao "thanks" .
"Thanks" is informal - you can say it to your friends but it could be rude if you say that to your grandmother. "Thank you" is more formal and more polite.
I'm a native English speaker. 'Thank you" is a more emphatic version of "thanks." For example, you'd probably say "thanks" if somebody got you a glass of water. But you'd probably say "thank you" if somebody bought you a new car. "Thanks" is often spoken more neutrally than "thank you."
How do you know if they are telling you thank you or no thank you.. It says it meanz both.???
I don't think this is real problem because you can always add "não" to make the "no thank you" meaning clear.
I'm told it is possible for "obrigado/a" to mean "no, thank you" in certain circumstances. Let's say you have just finished a meal and the waiter asks if you would like a coffee, if you respond with simply "obrigado/a" rather than something like "obrigado/a, aceito" it is possible the coffee will never come. :-)
Well, I got that cultural snippet from one of the comments (the one by SeeBe) at the end of this amusing article: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/06/brazilians-ctd
1289
Thank you for sharing, David! Your link prompted me to find the precursory blog post in the Economist, plus another post which is also apparently related. Quite amusing stuff!
http://olivierdobrasil.blogspot.com.br/2013/04/curiosidades-brasileiras.html
What is the real meaning because it says no thanks and i put that but its wrong
Please look at my reply to Anisa3696.
Think of it as "thanks" or "thank you". The "no thank you" interpretation is only found in very restricted circumstances: see my replies to 1FAUSTO8.
- 1289
Perhaps he's reading a bedtime story to his child? Or perhaps he's reading lines for an actress? Or maybe he's reminding his daughter that she should say thank-you to someone? Honestly, duoLingo requires a fair amount of imagination sometimes! ;-)
Well.... the system doesn't really know grammar to select the correct voice for this sentence.
The voice will only repeat what is written.
