There’s a lot more to Brazil than football, coffee and carnivals! We talk all about Brazil in this episode, so get ready to Samba and improve your English, on this episode of Aprender Inglés con Reza y Craig.
Reza is doing up his flat. How’s the building work going?
Voice message from Eurico from Brazil
He’s going to Cambridge to improve his English!
Hello to Ewerthon Lima from Goiânia, near Brasília. Ewerton listens on the Spotify platform. He lives in London and works as a delivery rider, so he spends a lot of time listening to us on his motorbike as he rides around London.
Voice message from Fabian from Brazil He’s a (house) painter in New Zealand – painting, sanding, undercoating, rubbing down, filling in the cracks
Brazil
Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest country by area and the fifth most populous (over 208 million people).
The capital is Brasilia and the largest city is Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo has some of the worst traffic jams in the world and also the largest GDP of any city in the Southern Hemisphere.
The official language of Brazil is Portuguese.
What do you think of when you think of Brazil?
football (to date the Brazilian football team is also the only nation to have won five World Cups – it’s the most successful country at football – Pele, Ronaldinho, Zico, Ronaldo, Romário)
Rainforest – the Amazon
caipirinha
Capoeira
music (Samba, Bossa Nova, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Marisa Monte, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Carlinhos Brown, Daniela Mercury, Elis Regina, Vinicius de Moraes, Toquinho, Milton Nascimento…)
Carnivals (Rio de Janeiro is just one of several areas that hold huge carnivals, including Sao Paulo, Bahia, Minas Gerais, Espirito Santo, Pernambuco, etc.)
coffee (Brazil has been the largest coffee producer in the world for over 150 years)
Fun facts:
Brazil has an island that has so many snakes that it’s too dangerous for humans to visit. One snake per metre! Ilha Queimada Grande is populated by the venomous Golden lancehead snake.
The Amazon Rainforest is home to more than 40,000 species of flora, 2,000 species of fish, over 400 species of both mammals and amphibians, almost an equal number of reptiles and 2.5 million insects. That’s 30% of Earth’s flora and fauna!
Ethanol is renewable since it’s derived from plants and the production and combustion completes a cycle. 92% of all new cars use ethanol as fuel.
The River Amazon – which has the largest water flow of all rivers, 12,540,000 cubic meters of water every minute – used to flow in the opposite direction! It flowed into the Pacific Ocean before the Andes Mountains formed. When blocked by their formation, it slowly started to flow into the Atlantic.
Although it’s the second longest longest river in the world (nearly 4,000 miles), there are no bridges at all crossing it!
The world’s best beach can be found in Brazil (according to Trip Adviser). Baia do Sancho in the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha. It’s a marine park with whales, sharks, parrotfish, clownfish and turtles.
Brazil has more than 4,000 airports – more than any other country other than the US (which has 13,513).
More than 220 languages or dialects are spoken in Brazil today. But it’s estimated that before the Portuguese arrived, it might have been more like 1,000! As well as official indigenous languages, such as Nheengatu, other European languages have official status in some areas, including a German dialect unique to Brazil and Japanese.
Feijoada is the national dish of Brazil which is a stew of beans with beef and pork.
Tours of Brazil’s shanty towns, or “favelas”, have become popular tourist attractions in recent years.
Bruno, our Gold Sponsor on Patreon, offers walking tours of Copenhagen – in English and Spanish – https://www.copenhagenwalkingtour.com/
Also, Favela walking tour in Rio, led by local guides only. It’s safe and it helps the community to improve their daily needs. Go to Bruno’s websites to find out more information: http://www.favelawalkingtour.com.br/
…and now it’s your turn to practise your English. Is there a country that you would like to hear about? Let us know and we’ll try to include it in a future podcast.
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On next week’s episode: We answer Luigi’s question: How can a Spanish speaker who is living abroad integrate well into British culture?
The music in this podcast is by Pitx. The track is called ‘See You Later’
Picking fingers by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/59513 Ft: unreal_dm
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Hello, guys.
My name is Denise and I’m from Brazil. I loved the episode about my country, mainly because you mentioned amazing singers we have. You should check Maria Rita’s songs; she’s Elis Regina’s daughter and a very successful artist.
Feijoada is very popular among Brazilians. You should try one day! Most of us also love rice and beans (not necessarily the same kind we use to prepare feijoada).
About Carnival, here where I live, São Paulo, the holiday has become something really big in the last couple of years. Millions of citizens and foreigns celebrate it; but I think that people still think of Rio de Janeiro as their typical image of Carnival.
Finally, if you get interested in our literature, you can read Milton Hatoum’s books. He’s really good.
I hope you can visit us. Just be aware that if you come during summer (December to March), you should be prepare to face our hot weather, hahahahaha.
Cheers!
Thank you for the information, Denise. I’d love to visit your country. This year is impossible, but I’m going to try and get to Brazil soon.
Hi guys! I’ve recently discovered your fantastic podcast in Spotify so I’m very glad of having the opportunity to improve my English skills with such a funny and spontaneous people like u guys 😉
I’ve enjoyed a lot with this episode and I’ve learned interesting things about the Brazilian culture.
I’ m from Barcelona so if you want to learn Catalan, you know! Here I am haha.;)
Congratulations for your podcast! I’ve just begun to practice my English after many years since I was a teenager learning grammar with boring text books in secundary school (actually I’m 40 years old)..Sorry for my mistakes.I hope get more fluency with your audios.
My bests,
Veronica
Thank you for listening, Veronica. We’re looking forward to getting your first voice message so that you can practice your speaking, too! https://www.speakpipe.com/inglespodcast