Commercial vehicles

The thirteenth entry is a perda de eficácia dos travões, and its length is the lesson. English says « brake fade », two words, and the second is the ordinary verb « to fade » pressed into a noun with no suffix at all. That conversion is one of the quietest and most productive rules in the language: « a skid », « a spill », « a leak », « a stall », « a drop », « a run » are all verbs standing still and wearing an article, and a workshop reaches for them before it reaches for anything longer. Portuguese cannot do it. It has to build a proper noun first, a perda, and then hang the rest on with prepositions, de eficácia, dos travões, so that a two-word compound comes out as five. Two habits follow. Going into English, resist « the loss of effectiveness of the brakes », which is grammatical and which nobody says. Coming out of it, expect the chain of de and leave it alone, because there is no way to turn a Portuguese verb into a bare noun on the spot.