Tu E Eu
Diogo Piçarra
- Language
- Portuguese
- Released
- 2015
- Genre
- pop
- Level
- A1+
- Difficulty score
- 458
- Duration
- 3:35
How to study this song
“Tu E Eu” carries 11 Portuguese words, 4 adjectives and 34 verb forms — 49 study entries in all, graded A1+. Begin with amor and terra: get those and most of the lines stop being guesswork. This one leans on its verbs: 34 distinct forms against 4 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| amor | love | amor | amore | amour | liefde | Liebe |
| terra | earth, ground | tierra | terra | terre | aarde | Erde, Boden |
This card holds 9 more words. You meet them when you play the song.
Adjectives
| PT | EN | ES | IT |
|---|
What this song teaches you
Level · A1+
- Vocabulary words
- 11
- Adjectives
- 4
- Word combos
- 5
- Expressions
- 12
- Verb forms
- 34
- Quiz questions
- 35
More Portuguese songs at this level
Background
About the song
«Tu E Eu» is the song that introduced Diogo Piçarra as a recording artist. Piçarra was born in Faro, in the Algarve, on 19 October 1990, and it took him several attempts to get noticed. He formed his first band, Fora da Bóia, at seventeen, and he auditioned without success for the talent show «Ídolos» in 2009 and for «Operação Triunfo» in 2010. He went back to «Ídolos» for its fifth season, in 2012, and this time he won. The prize included a car, a study grant at the London College of Music and a recording contract with Universal Music. Alongside all this he completed a degree in music at the University of the Algarve.
The first result of that contract arrived at the beginning of 2015. «Tu E Eu» was released in early February, together with its music video, as the first single from his debut album. The writing credit is shared between Piçarra and Pedro Puppe dos Santos. The album, «Espelho» («Mirror»), followed on 16 March 2015 on Universal. It was produced by Fred Ferreira and has twelve tracks; «Tu E Eu» is the second, right after the short opener «Breve». «Verdadeiro», «Sopro» and «Breve» were later released as singles too.
Musically it is a mid-tempo pop ballad of about three and a half minutes, and it is written as a conversation with one person. The verses go through the things that could separate two people — love fading, time changing them, the passion going out, the years taking their toll — and after each threat the singer answers that he will still be there. The chorus rests on a condition: if the other person feels about him the way he feels about her, and says yes, they already have everything they need to get back to what they once dreamed. The second verse admits that some of those fears have already come true, and a short bridge argues that nothing worth having is built without first getting things wrong.
That structure makes it an unusually clear lesson in European Portuguese. Piçarra addresses the other person as «tu», the ordinary informal «you» in Portugal, so the verbs carry the second-person endings that Brazilian pop rarely uses. And almost every threat in the verses is set up with the future subjunctive, a tense Spanish has lost: after «se» (if) or «quando» (when) Portuguese uses a form that often looks just like the infinitive, but gives itself away in irregular verbs, as with «for» from «ser», and in the «tu» person, which adds -es. The promises that answer those conditions are in the simple future.