Today’s top two new things were:
Orelha and Ouvida: I have known for a while that there were two words for the ear but I had lazily assumed they were synonyms. But in fact, Ouvido is the bit you hear with and Orelha is just the flappy bit on the outside.
This sentence:
Em casa da família de acolhimento é melhor que o estudante tenha a idade aproximada à das crianças da família.
was baffling to me because the à [a+a], immediately followed by das [de+as] seems to mean “to the of the children” until I finally wrapped my head around what it was doing. The à is actually “to it” not “to the” because an a can be a pronoun as well as an article, so the sentence means
In the house of the host family it’s better that the student be of the same age as it (i.e “as the age”) of the children in the family.
As for the actual statement itself, OK, I know, I’m not sure why that would be true, but when I had the initial conversation about this I thought “família de acolhimento” meant a foster family, so it made a sort of sense. I think it’s more like a host family in some sort of school exchange program though.
