Language acquisition

The twenty-fifth entry is a retoma da correção, and the English name for it is one short noun: uptake. What matters is where a reader has already met that word, because the field took it out of ordinary speech and ordinary speech keeps it inside one fixed complaint. To be « slow on the uptake » is to be slow to catch what is going on — the joke that has to be explained, the hint that lands and is not picked up. That phrase is nearly the only home the noun has outside a laboratory, and it is always mildly unkind. Worth knowing before the technical sense arrives, because the technical sense carries no blame. Learner uptake is simply what a pupil does with a correction in the seconds after it is offered: repeating it, rebuilding the sentence around it, or saying nothing. Portuguese reaches instead for a retoma, a taking up again, and has built nothing on top of it — nobody calls a slow colleague lento na retoma. So the English word turns up already carrying a tone the Portuguese one has never had, and the sentence around it has to strip that tone off.