15 Comments
1343
Brian, I realize you wrote your comment a long time ago, but just in the event it's still relevant, the answer to your question is related to whether muito is functioning as an adjective or an adverb. Adjectives and nouns are declined for gender and number, while adverbs aren't.
In this case, nervosa is the adjective, hence it is declined to agree with the subject (who is apparently female). Muito modifies nervosa, hence it is an adverb and is not declined.
It is fine, but it lacks context
Friend of Jonas: "Why don't you ask Joana out on a date?" Jonas: "I am too nervous"
Jonas: "I am very nervous" Friend of Jonas: "Why?" Jonas: "because I am about to ask Joana out on a date"
maybe i missed the point of your question, I hope this helps
- 1068
I think this is wrong. At least in Brazilian Portuguese, nervosa signifies angry or irritated. It is a false cognate.
i think in this case the whole net translation is wrong. in most cases "estar nervoso/nervosa" means being nervous. in some cases it has been translated as angry or embarrassed. anyway angry preferred to translated as "estar zangado/zangada", and irritated as "estar irritado/irritada"... i think the situation matters as well, but generally it means nervous.
- 1068
I disagree. I live in Brazil, and this is one of these things that I have been explicitly told by my wife (Brazilian) and teachers is a thing foreigners often confuse. Sometimes the colloquial word nervoso can work as in English, for example when it is used to express anxiety, but a better translation would be anxious because that is what the Brazilian word means. Most often it means irritated or angry. A vast majority of the time using nervoso as a translation of nervous will not work. Check out this link.
http://www.tegidiomas.com/2012/01/06/false-friends-nervousnervoso/
Well... the Portuguese dictionaries seem fine with nervoso as a translation for nervous:
https://www.linguee.com/portuguese-english/translation/nervoso.html
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-portuguese/nervous
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-portuguese/nervous
https://en.bab.la/dictionary/english-portuguese/get-nervous
http://www.wordreference.com/enpt/nervous
http://www.wordreference.com/pten/nervoso
https://dictionary.reverso.net/english-portuguese/nervous
https://www2.rocketlanguages.com/portuguese/lessons/emotions-in-portuguese/
Then there is this:
https://www.portuguesepod101.com/portuguese-phrases/05182019?meaning
That has this photo (maybe it is of your wife?):
And while anxious is certainly the type of nervous most think of first when encountering the word in English, there is another word for that in both languages (same with irritated, angry, and agitated):
https://www.linguee.com/english-portuguese/translation/anxious.html
Nervous though can also mean several other things.
However, the two languages may be more similar than it seems at first because the translation of nerve is also nervoso:
https://www.linguee.com/english-portuguese/search?source=auto&query=nerves
And that is in line with the English use: Boy, has he got a fat lot of nerve to pull that stunt on me! or, That man is getting on my last nerve! or There was a nervous tension in the air.
I do appreciate your input and the challenge it presented to me as I found several new resources that will be helpful to me in the future including this tegidiomas blog (though I am more after the Euro version). :)
Thanks for making this point. I was very confused by how Brazilians use this word until I realized it was a false cognate.
