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- Topic: Portuguese >
- "Ela passa roupas."
14 Comments
Quite a varied mix of meanings. ;)
I guess in Portuguese it's all about the context to understand the verbs.
it is "irons" when it concerns to clothes. The complete expression is "passar a ferro" - "ferro" is Portuguese for "iron".
Same in English
Iron=Metal
Iron=Device
Pass as in bus pass, or pass as in He passed the salt to me or the cars passed (by) so quickly. All about context.
Well, it would be exactly the same way, in the sense "she gives the clothes to someone else". You will need context to get the right meaning. The verb "passar" has many different meanings, I think Duolingo is just trying to teach you that "ironing" is one of them.
"Passar" can also mean "dealing", as in dealing drugs. "He deals drugs" is "Ele passa droga".
We should not be required to "translate what we hear," it's WAY too difficult to understand what's being said, I get it wrong almost every time. :-(
That's how you learn a language, through multiple aspects: reading, writing, listening, understanding, and speaking. You'll get it with time. It's all part of the process; if one can't understand it, one can't really say one speaks it. That's why the slow-version exists too. :)
dennisk, I still have the same problem sometimes, and occassionally the slower version is harder than the fast one, because in the slower version the first letter is quite often not spoken at all eg. When the lady says "Tudo", she often misses out the "T" or it is so quiet that you can't hear it. However, now that I have got this far, I can make out what most of the rest of the sentece means, and can therefore make a good guess at the missing word. An easy example is something like "eu gosto..." If I can't hear the first word, the word "gosto" tells me that the first word must have been "eu". It really does help to find other clues in a sentence to know what the whole thing says. Hope this helps!
