Ceramics and pottery

Fifth on the list is levantar uma peça na roda, and the sentence under it does something an English reader has to undo. Levantar uma peça na roda leva meses a aprender puts a bare infinitive in the subject seat, and English will not leave one there. « To throw a pot on the wheel takes months » is grammatical and stiff; what anybody actually says is « throwing a pot on the wheel takes months ». Wherever Portuguese uses the plain infinitive as a noun, English reaches for the -ing form, and this page is full of the pattern — amassar o barro tira as bolhas de ar, tornear o pé acerta o peso da taça, all of them « wedging », « turning ». The second half of that sentence is worth learning whole, because it is a fixed frame: levar, then a stretch of time, then a, then a second infinitive. Leva meses a aprender, levou uma hora a arrefecer, leva dois dias a secar. The preposition is compulsory and it is a, never para and never de. Leave it out and the sentence stops saying how long the work takes.