Há Um Mar Que Nos Separa
Leonor Andrade
- Language
- Portuguese
- Released
- 2015
- Genre
- pop-rock
- Level
- A1+
- Difficulty score
- 480
- Special
- Eurovision
- Duration
- 3:00
How to study this song
“Há Um Mar Que Nos Separa” carries 17 Portuguese words, 5 adjectives and 17 verb forms — 39 study entries in all, graded A1+. Start with the glossary: três, manhã and chuva come up again and again, so they are the ones to know first. This one leans on its verbs: 17 distinct forms against 5 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| três | three | tres | tre | trois | drie | drei |
| manhã | morning | mañana | mattina | matin | ochtend | Morgen |
| chuva | rain | lluvia | pioggia | pluie | regen | Regen |
| ruas | streets | calles | strade | rues |
What this song teaches you
Level · A1+
- Vocabulary words
- 17
- Adjectives
- 5
- Word combos
- 7
- Expressions
- 10
- Verb forms
- 17
- Quiz questions
- 35
More Portuguese songs at this level
Background
About the song
«Há Um Mar Que Nos Separa» («There Is a Sea That Separates Us») was Portugal’s entry at the Eurovision Song Contest 2015 in Vienna. Both words and music are by Miguel Gameiro, born in 1974, who founded the Lisbon pop band Pólo Norte in the 1990s and has worked as a solo singer since 2010. The recording was produced by Fernando Martins and released by RTP, the Portuguese public broadcaster, together with Universal Music: on streaming services on 20 March 2015 and as a download on 7 April. It is a short pop-rock track, just under three minutes long, with an electric, slightly electronic edge.
The singer, Leonor Andrade, was born in Barreiro, across the Tagus from Lisbon, on 13 September 1994. She was twenty when she won. The public had first seen her in 2014 on the second season of «The Voice Portugal», where she reached the thirteenth episode, and afterwards she joined the cast of the RTP1 telenovela «Água de Mar», playing a character called Joana Luz.
The song won Festival da Canção 2015, the Portuguese national selection. RTP invited twelve composers, each of whom chose a performer, and the twelve songs were split between two semi-finals on 3 and 5 March, held at the broadcaster’s Studio 2 in Lisbon. Andrade sang in the first semi-final and went through on the public vote. In the final on 7 March the viewers picked two songs, the jury added a third, and a last round decided by telephone vote alone gave her the victory ahead of Teresa Radamanto and Gonçalo Tavares.
The lyric is a love song about distance. It opens in a rainy city in the middle of the night, with the singer unable to pull herself together because the other person is not there. The sea of the title is the obstacle between the two lovers, and the chorus answers it with a defiant image: longing strong enough to dry the ocean. A middle section goes back to the memory of touch and taste, and contrasts the night the two met with the morning the singer lost the other person.
For learners the song is a good introduction to the Portuguese of Portugal rather than Brazil. It uses «tu» with its own verb forms, and it places object pronouns after the verb with a hyphen, including the change of «o» into «-lo» after an infinitive. It also contains «saudade», the word Portuguese speakers like to call untranslatable.