18 Comments
Oh, of course! :) I thought this was one of the Duolingo's funny sentences and it actually makes sense.
139
Well, actually ceiling fans are useful to distribute heat more evenly in the winter (spinning counter-clockwise) , especially if you have central or radiating heating in your home.
In Brazil, December is one of the hottest months of the year. Fans are indeed very useful for us to not celebrate the Christmas all wet in sweat!
They look similar but have different meanings. As far as I'm aware, ventilator in English is something that assists breathing, or assists airflow in/out of a building/room. In this case it just translates to fan.
I didn't know they spoke Portuguese there! Is it more like Brazilian or European Portuguese?
It is EP PT in all places outside of Brazil. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_entities_where_Portuguese_is_an_official_language
Which makes sense since it was the Portuguese going from place to place in the conquering "age of discovery" days (including Brazil). =]
Well, and then there is the Portuguese diaspora that makes up a third of Luxembourg, a significant part of Andorra, and makes Paris the city with the second highest population of Portuguese people (behind Lisboa). There are also significant populations of Portuguese in New York, New Jersey, Boston, Toronto, Vancouver, London, Germany, The Netherlands, and in Finland among others.
I don't know enough about the difference to be able to say -- I guess you'll have to go and find out!
This, and the comments, remind me of two sci-fi space travellers one of whom says to the other: "Just think, it's Winter back on Earth"...
