Sei Lá
by Bárbara Tinoco
- Language
- Portuguese
- Released
- 2019
- Genre
- pop
- Level
- A1+
- Difficulty score
- 474
How to study this song
The card for “Sei Lá” is built from 56 study entries at A1+: 17 Portuguese words, 6 adjectives and 33 verb forms. Start with the glossary: dia, semana and estação come up again and again, so they are the ones to know first. This one leans on its verbs: 33 distinct forms against 6 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| PT | EN | ES | IT | FR | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| dia | day | día | giorno | jour | dag | Tag |
Adjectives
| PT | EN | ES | IT | FR | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| louca | crazy (f.) | loca | pazza | folle | gek | verrückt (f.) |
This card holds 5 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.
Verb forms
| PT | EN | ES | IT | FR | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| sei | I know | sé | so | je sais | ik weet | ich weiß |
What this song teaches you
Level · A1+
- Vocabulary words
- 17
- Adjectives
- 6
- Word combos
- 5
- Expressions
- 9
- Verb forms
- 33
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
«Sei Lá» was the second single of Bárbara Tinoco, a Portuguese singer-songwriter born in Lisbon on 16 November 1998 and raised in Cacém, on the city’s western outskirts. Music ran in the family: her father is a sound technician, the family owned a musical instrument shop in the Rossio area of Lisbon, her grandfather gave her a ukulele as her first instrument and her father taught her the guitar when she was twelve. She went on to study Musical Sciences at the NOVA University of Lisbon.
Her career began with a failure that turned into a success. In 2018 she auditioned for «The Voice Portugal» with Dolly Parton’s «Jolene» and none of the coaches turned their chair. Before she left the stage she was asked to play something of her own, and she sang «Antes Dela Dizer Que Sim», a song she had written at sixteen. The clip spread quickly online, the song became her debut single in 2019 and she found a manager, Pedro Barbosa, and a place as the opening act on João Só’s tour that year.
«Sei Lá» came out on 10 December 2019, with a music video released the same day. Tinoco wrote both the words and the music, and the track was produced and mixed by João André. It had the difficult job of proving that the first hit was not a one-off: when it was released, «Antes Dela Dizer Que Sim» was already close to five million views on YouTube. The answer was a quieter, more intimate song, built around a voice that sounds almost like someone thinking aloud, and it did more than hold its own.
The song is sung in the first person by a young woman who is not sure of much. The first verse piles up small uncertainties, from the day of the week to the season, and she admits she may not even want to know the answers; people say she has gone mad, and she feels she is no longer the person she used to be. The chorus turns to a relationship that is out of balance. She keeps promising, praying and giving, while the other person offers pretty words worthy of a soap opera and takes a little more of her each time; the question she keeps coming back to is what will be left of her in the end. In the second verse the roles are reversed: now it is the other person who knows nothing, about her private battles, about the songs she writes and about how much she loves them.
The title is the key to the whole song. In Portugal «sei lá» is an everyday shrug, a way of saying «who knows» or «don’t ask me», and «sabes lá» turns it on the listener: «what would you know». Tinoco uses the two phrases as a frame, first to talk about her own confusion and then to accuse the person who never tried to understand her. Many listeners, especially young ones, recognised in it the feeling of giving too much in a relationship, and that recognition is a large part of why the song lasted.