Follow a walking detour in Portuguese

Draw only what the speaker supplies

Choose a real walking tour or directions exchange with clear spoken instructions. A fast montage with music is not suitable. Draw a starting dot and a destination box. Add streets and landmarks only as you hear them. You do not need an accurate city map to practise sequence. In fact, an elaborate map can make you guess the route from landmarks instead of following the speech. Keep your first sketch small and easy to correct.

Our sample starts near a bridge that cannot be crossed. A ponte is the bridge. Atravesse is an instruction to cross. Continue means continue. These verbs describe actions, while esquerda and direita describe direction. Give the action its own place in your note. A list of left and right without a verb will not tell you whether to turn, cross or stay on the same pavement.

Separate the blocked path from the usable one

Não atravesse a ponte marks the forbidden route. Put a cross on it. The next instruction continues beside the river rather than crossing it. Junto ao rio means beside or close to the river. It does not necessarily mean directly on the riverbank. The worksheet asks you to follow the words, not infer a safe footpath from the English translation. Real route safety requires current local information.

Até ao segundo semáforo gives a stopping point: as far as the second traffic light. The count matters. A turn at the first light would produce a different route. Write two small markers on your sketch and circle the second. If a recording says depois do semáforo, after the traffic light, do not replace it with at the light. The relationship to the landmark is part of the instruction.

Keep left and right relative to the walker

Aí vire à esquerda means turn left there. Aí points back to the stopping point just given. It does not name a new landmark. Imagine yourself walking along your sketch, then turn from that direction. Do not use the left side of your page as the automatic meaning of left. Rotating the paper can help you notice this error without adding more vocabulary.

The pharmacy is depois da padaria, after the bakery. That phrase sets the order of landmarks. It does not say that the pharmacy is inside the bakery or directly opposite it. On a second pass, draw the bakery before the pharmacy. If the side of the street is not stated, leave it unstated. A sparse but supported sketch is better than a detailed invented one.

Check the route with a new starting point

We make Jibber Jabber. Caption lookup can help check a direction word in a suitable available video. The vocabulary guide gives a wider method for useful phrases. The app is not a navigation service. This original route has no real destination. Do not use an old walking video as evidence that a path is currently open.

After the answer key, trace the route without reading. Explain which action would take you onto the closed path. Then find another spoken route with a different obstacle, such as a closed entrance. Use the same action–landmark method but start a fresh sketch. If your summary includes every turn and correctly excludes the blocked route, you have met the listening goal even if you cannot repeat the instructions word for word.

Questions & answers

Sources for this entry

• Jibber Jabber feature documentation ↗ — supports the caption and vocabulary feature statements. Checked 9 November 2026.
• Workbook method — explains our original examples, regional labels and limits. The exercises are editorial practice, not research findings or recorded transcripts.

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Useful terms: repair, listening evidence, inference and listening task.