As you may recall from the earlier Portuguese conjunctions unit, conjunctions are words that connect other words or phrases together. They help you link your thoughts together by showing different types of relationships between the parts of a sentence.
You practiced with many different types of “coordinating” conjunctions, which serve different purposes, such as showing contrast, presenting choices, providing explanations, showing cause and effect, etc.
In this Unit we’re focusing on conjunções subordinativassubordinating conjunctions . These join an oração subordinanteindependent clause to a oração subordinadadependent clause .
These conjunctions can be divided into the following main categories:
Understanding which category each conjunction falls into and why is not important for most learners, but dividing them up like this can help you get in the right mindset as you think about the meaning behind the translation.
Nébuleuse explanation
Let us know if you have any questions we can answer! This particular introduction is mainly just to tell you what’s coming next. You’ll get a more thorough explanation in the upcoming learning notes on temporal, causal, and final subordinating conjunctions. 🙂
I’m learning more about English language constructs in this Portuguese course than I learned in school in Canada! 🙂
I find these theory sessions difficult to follow because I do not understand the basic English definition of of a function for example, so text following the use of a special language term is not understood. Is there any way you could reword some of these explanations to more simple ‘plain’ English so it’s easier to follow the explanation through to the end?
Thanks for the feedback! I understand — the grammar terminology can add an extra layer of confusion at times.
We try to simplify the language when possible, but in this case, we thought using the grammar terms could be a convenient way to categorize and discuss the conjunctions. (Instead of just showing a long list of conjunctions and examples.) Some learners find it easier to learn and understand the translation when they think about the different roles conjunctions can play in a sentence. But it would be difficult to discuss that without using terms like dependent/independent clause. (We could simplify it more, though.) For other learners, this information is not helpful at all — they want a quick explanation, and then to see how it’s used.
For this Unit at least, I think you could safely ignore most of the explanation and just focus on the examples. The basic idea is just that conjunctions link different parts of a sentence together to show different types of relationships between those parts.
I’ve made a note to review the Learning Notes in this Unit to try to simplify. I agree that there’s probably a better way to present this. If there are other Learning Notes that were particularly confusing, send us a message through our contact form and we’ll be happy to take a look.