Portuguese I

The big picture

Here is a fact that reorders most people's mental map. Portuguese is the most widely spoken language in the entire Southern Hemisphere. Not Spanish, not English, not Arabic: Portuguese. It is spoken by roughly 260 million people across four continents, it is the sixth or seventh most spoken native language on Earth depending on how you count, and it is the official language of nine countries scattered from the Atlantic coast of South America to the eastern edge of Indonesia. And yet in most American and British schools it sits in the shadow of Spanish, treated as a curiosity, a dialect, a rounding error.

That reputation is wrong, and this lesson dismantles it before you learn a single verb. Portuguese has its own thousand-year literature, its own sound system that Spanish speakers cannot produce without training, and its own grammar. It is also unusually rewarding for an English speaker: the spelling follows rules, and a large share of the vocabulary looks familiar because English borrowed the same Latin words through French.

This course teaches the Brazilian standard, because Brazil holds about four fifths of the world's Portuguese speakers and is where most learners will actually use what they study. But we will not pretend Portugal does not exist. Every lesson flags the European differences honestly, because a learner who is surprised by them later has been badly served. Today: the family tree, the world map, the Spanish question, and your first words.

A Romance language born in the northwest

Portuguese is a Romance language, which means it is Latin that kept talking. When the Roman legions moved into the Iberian Peninsula beginning in 218 BCE, they brought the everyday spoken Latin of soldiers and merchants, not the polished Latin of Cicero. Over centuries that spoken Latin drifted apart from region to region, and by the ninth century the far northwest corner of the peninsula, the old Roman province of Gallaecia and the county of Portucale on the river Douro, was speaking something recognizably its own. Scholars call it Galician-Portuguese, and it produced a body of medieval lyric poetry, the cantigas, that is still read today.

Then politics split the language in two. In 1143 the County of Portugal became an independent kingdom, and as its rulers pushed south they carried their speech with them, absorbing Arabic vocabulary from the Muslim-ruled south along the way. Words like alface (lettuce), azeite (olive oil), almofada (cushion), and arroz (rice) still carry the Arabic definite article al fused to the front. The southern half of Galician-Portuguese became Portuguese, standardized around Lisbon and the university city of Coimbra. The northern half stayed inside Spain and became modern Galician, which remains the closest living relative Portuguese has: a Galician speaker and a Portuguese speaker can converse with only minor friction.

From 1500 the language went global. Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet reached the Brazilian coast that April, two years after Vasco da Gama opened the sea route to India, and Portuguese then travelled with traders, missionaries, and, in a history the language cannot be separated from, with the transatlantic slave trade that carried roughly five million enslaved Africans to Brazil, more than to any other destination in the Americas. Brazilian Portuguese carries the evidence in its everyday vocabulary: samba, moleque (kid), cafuné (the affectionate scratching of someone's head), and quiabo (okra) come from African languages, chiefly Kimbundu and Yoruba. Indigenous Tupi contributed thousands more, including most of the country's place names and the words abacaxi (pineapple), mandioca (cassava), and piranha.

Key idea: Portuguese is spoken Latin as it developed in the northwest corner of Iberia, split from Galician by the birth of Portugal in 1143, carried worldwide after 1500, and reshaped in Brazil by African and Indigenous languages.

The Lusophone world

The adjective for the Portuguese-speaking world is Lusophone, from Lusitania, the Roman name for roughly the territory of Portugal. Nine countries claim Portuguese as an official language, and their populations are wildly uneven.

Country	Approximate population	Note
Brazil	about 203 million	About four fifths of all Portuguese speakers
Angola	about 36 million	Largest Portuguese-speaking African country
Mozambique	about 33 million	Portuguese official, many Bantu languages at home
Portugal	about 10 million	Where the standard was first written down
Guinea-Bissau	about 2 million	A Portuguese-based creole is the common tongue
Equatorial Guinea	about 1.7 million	Official since 2010, though little spoken
Timor-Leste	about 1.4 million	Portuguese and Tetum, independent since 2002
Cabo Verde	about 0.5 million	Portuguese official, Cape Verdean Creole at home
São Tomé and Príncipe	about 0.2 million	Small islands, high Portuguese fluency

These nine, plus Macau on the Chinese coast where Portuguese remains co-official, form the CPLP, the Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa, founded in 1996. Add the diaspora and the map grows again: large Portuguese-speaking communities in the United States, Canada, France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Japan, where hundreds of thousands of Brazilian descendants of Japanese emigrants went to work.

One consequence matters for you as a learner: there is no single accent that counts as correct Portuguese. A Lisbon news anchor, a Rio taxi driver, a Luanda musician, and a Maputo teacher all speak the same language and understand each other, but they sound strikingly different.

Key idea: Portuguese is official in nine countries on four continents plus Macau, Brazil holds about four fifths of the speakers, and no single national accent is the correct one.

The Spanish question, answered honestly

Almost everyone asks it, so let us settle it. Portuguese and Spanish are close siblings. Their written vocabularies overlap by something close to ninety percent, they share nearly all their grammar categories, and a literate speaker of one can read a newspaper in the other with effort and a dictionary. If you already know Spanish, you have a genuine head start worth perhaps a full semester.

But the relationship is asymmetric, and this is the part that surprises people. Portuguese speakers understand spoken Spanish far more easily than Spanish speakers understand spoken Portuguese. The reason is phonological. Spanish has five vowel sounds. Portuguese has roughly twice as many, plus five nasal vowels and a set of nasal diphthongs Spanish lacks entirely, plus a habit of swallowing unstressed vowels. A Portuguese ear hearing Spanish meets a subset of sounds it already knows; a Spanish ear hearing Portuguese meets sounds with no home in its system. The mixed border speech that results has its own affectionate name, portunhol.

The other Spanish hazard is vocabulary that looks identical and is not. These falsos amigos, false friends, cause real embarrassment, and the same traps catch English speakers reasoning from Latin roots.

Word	Means in Portuguese	The Spanish look-alike means	Say this instead
embaraçada	embarrassed, tangled up	embarazada: pregnant	grávida for pregnant
esquisito	weird, odd, off-putting	exquisito: exquisite, delicious	delicioso for delicious
oficina	workshop, repair garage	oficina: office	escritório for office
salsa	parsley	salsa: sauce	molho for sauce
borracha	rubber, eraser	borracha: drunk	bêbada for drunk
polvo	octopus	polvo: dust	pó for dust
largo	wide	largo: long	comprido for long
cena	scene	cena: dinner	jantar for dinner
apelido	nickname in Brazil, surname in Portugal	apellido: surname	sobrenome for surname in Brazil

Notice the last row: apelido is a false friend twice over, meaning nickname in Brazil and surname in Portugal. One word, two standards, and an honest teacher who tells you which is which.

Key idea: Spanish gives you a large free vocabulary but a misleading ear, because Portuguese has many more vowel sounds than Spanish; and the false friends, from esquisito to embaraçada, are worth memorizing on day one.

Two standards, one language

Brazilian and European Portuguese differ in four places, and naming them now will save you confusion for sixteen lessons. First, pronunciation, which is the biggest gap: Brazilians pronounce unstressed vowels fully and often add a light vowel after final consonants, so the language sounds open and musical, while Europeans compress unstressed vowels almost to nothing, so the language sounds clipped and consonant-heavy. Second, vocabulary: a train is o trem in Brazil and o comboio in Portugal, breakfast is o café da manhã in Brazil and o pequeno-almoço in Portugal, a bus is o ônibus or o autocarro, juice is suco or sumo. Third, pronouns: Brazil says você for you, Portugal says tu, and each conjugates its verbs differently, which Lesson 4 handles in full. Fourth, pronoun placement in sentences, which belongs to Portuguese II.

Spelling, at least, has largely converged. The Acordo Ortográfico of 1990, phased in from 2009 onward, unified most spelling differences: Portugal stopped writing the silent consonants in acto and óptimo, now ato and ótimo as Brazil had always written them, and Brazil dropped the trema, so linguiça and cinquenta lost the two dots over the u.

Key idea: Brazilian and European Portuguese differ mainly in pronunciation, some vocabulary, and the you pronoun; the 1990 spelling agreement has since brought their written forms close together.

Your first ten words

Time to say something. Every Portuguese item in this course appears in real spelling with accents intact, followed by an English gloss and, where useful, a rough pronunciation hint in ordinary English letters. Those hints are approximations. Lessons 2 and 3 replace them with a real system.

Portuguese	Rough sound	English
oi	oy	hi (informal, Brazil)
olá	oh-LAH	hello
obrigado / obrigada	oh-bree-GAH-doo / oh-bree-GAH-dah	thank you (male speaker / female speaker)
por favor	poor fah-VOR	please
sim	see, ending through the nose	yes
não	nowng, all through the nose	no, not
tchau	chow	bye
água	AH-gwah	water
Brasil	brah-ZEEW	Brazil
saudade	sow-DAH-jee	longing for what is absent

Two of those deserve a moment. Obrigado is an adjective, not an interjection: it literally means obliged, and it agrees with the person saying it. A man says obrigado. A woman says obrigada. It does not matter who you are thanking. Learners get this backwards constantly, and getting it right on day one marks you as someone who was taught properly.

And saudade is the word Portuguese speakers are proudest of. It names the ache of missing something: a person, a place, a version of your own life. Portuguese even has an idiom built on it, matar a saudade, literally to kill the saudade, meaning to finally see someone you have missed. It turns up in fado, in bossa nova, and in ordinary text messages between friends.

What this course can and cannot do

One honest paragraph before we go further. This is a text course, and a page cannot make a sound. Portuguese has five nasal vowels and a set of nasal diphthongs that are its acoustic signature, and no amount of prose will put them in your ears. What prose can do, and what the next two lessons do carefully, is tell you exactly what your mouth, tongue, and soft palate should be doing, give you English anchors where English has a comparable sound, and hand you spelling rules that are genuinely reliable. When you want to check your ear, any free online dictionary with recorded audio, any Brazilian song with printed lyrics, or any film with Portuguese subtitles will confirm what these lessons describe. Read everything aloud anyway. Your mouth learns by moving.

Key idea: A text course can describe articulation, give anchors, and teach reliable spelling rules, but it cannot supply listening practice; pair these lessons with recorded audio whenever you can.

Common misconceptions

• Portuguese is a dialect of Spanish. They are sister languages descended separately from Latin, and neither came from the other; Portuguese split from Galician, not from Castilian.
• If you speak Spanish you can already speak Portuguese. You can read a great deal of it. Understanding rapid spoken Brazilian Portuguese is a different task, because Portuguese has roughly twice as many vowel sounds.
• Portuguese is mainly a European language. About four fifths of its speakers are Brazilian, and Angola alone has more than three times the population of Portugal.
• Obrigado changes with the person you thank. It agrees with the speaker: a man says obrigado, a woman says obrigada, regardless of the listener.
• Brazilian and European Portuguese are separate languages. They are one language with two standards, now sharing nearly all their spelling after the 1990 agreement, and speakers understand each other.

Recap

• Portuguese is a Romance language that grew from the spoken Latin of northwestern Iberia, separating from Galician when Portugal became a kingdom in 1143.
• Roughly 260 million people speak it; it is official in nine countries on four continents plus Macau, and Brazil holds about four fifths of the speakers.
• Brazilian Portuguese absorbed thousands of words from African languages and from Indigenous Tupi.
• Spanish gives learners a large free vocabulary but a misleading ear, and false friends such as esquisito, oficina, and embaraçada must be learned deliberately.
• Brazil and Portugal differ in pronunciation, some vocabulary, and the you pronoun, but the 1990 Acordo Ortográfico unified most spelling.

Sources

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Portuguese language. britannica.com
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Romance languages. britannica.com
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Brazil. britannica.com
4. Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa. (n.d.). CPLP: member states. cplp.org
5. Camões, Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua. (n.d.). Língua portuguesa. instituto-camoes.pt

The big picture

If you learn only one thing about Portuguese pronunciation, learn this: Portuguese is a vowel language. Spanish has five vowel sounds and English speakers find them easy. Portuguese has roughly twelve, and five of them are nasal, and the nasal ones are what make a Brazilian voice unmistakable from across a room. When someone says Portuguese sounds like Spanish spoken by someone with a cold, they are hearing the nasal vowels and misdiagnosing them.

So we spend a whole lesson here, and it is worth it, because Portuguese spelling is honest. Once you know the vowel system and the accent marks, an unfamiliar written word will usually tell you how to say it. That is a promise English cannot make. Today: the five letters and their many sounds, the open and closed distinction that separates grandmother from grandfather, what happens to vowels when they are not stressed, and then the main event, the nasals.

One honest reminder from Lesson 1. A page cannot make a sound. Everything below describes what your mouth and soft palate should be doing and anchors it to English wherever English has something comparable. Read every example aloud. Then, when you can, check yourself against a free online dictionary with recorded audio, because your ear will need what this page cannot give it.

Five letters, twelve sounds

Portuguese writes its vowels with the same five letters as English: a, e, i, o, u. Two of them are well behaved. The letter i is always the ee of machine: vi (I saw), dia (day), livro (book). The letter u is always the oo of moon: tudo (everything), uva (grape), luz (light). Never the uh of English cut, never the yoo of English use.

The other three, a, e, and o, each cover two different sounds when stressed, and the difference is not decorative. It distinguishes real words.

Letter	Closed value	Open value	Example pair
e	ê, like the ay of gate without the glide	é, like the e of bed	mês (month) vs pé (foot)
o	ô, like the o of note without the glide	ó, like the aw of law	avô (grandfather) vs avó (grandmother)
a	â, a shorter, more central a	á, the full ah of father	câmara (chamber) vs pá (shovel)

Look at the third column of that table again: avô is grandfather and avó is grandmother, and the only difference in speech is whether the o is closed or open. Portuguese families make this distinction dozens of times a day without thinking about it. Here are three more pairs that will convince you the distinction is load-bearing.

• o olho (the eye) has a closed o; eu olho (I look) has an open o. Same spelling, two words.
• o gosto (the taste) has a closed o; eu gosto (I like) has an open o.
• a sede meaning thirst has a closed e; a sede meaning headquarters has an open e.

There is a bonus pattern hiding here. A group of common nouns with a closed o in the singular open that o in the plural: ovo (egg) with closed o becomes ovos with open o, and the same happens with porco (pig), osso (bone), and olho. Nobody teaches this to Brazilian children; they simply do it. You can simply notice it.

Key idea: i and u each have one sound, but stressed a, e, and o each have an open and a closed value, and that difference alone separates avô from avó and eu gosto from o gosto.

How the accents tell you which

Here is where Portuguese repays you for learning its accent marks, and it is the single most useful trade in the language. Two of the accents encode vowel quality directly.

• The acute accent, á é ó, means stressed and open: café (coffee), história (history, story), pó (powder, dust), água (water).
• The circumflex, â ê ô, means stressed and closed: você (you), português (Portuguese), avô, ônibus (bus, Brazil).

So the written form of avó and avô is not a spelling quirk. It is a pronunciation instruction, and it works everywhere. When you meet an unfamiliar word carrying a circumflex, you already know two things about it: where the stress falls and that the vowel is closed. Lesson 3 completes the accent story, including the til, the cedilha, and the crase.

Key idea: The acute accent means stressed and open, the circumflex means stressed and closed, so the written accent is telling you exactly how to pronounce the vowel.

What happens away from the stress

Every Portuguese word has one stressed syllable, and the vowels in the other syllables shrink. This is where Brazil and Portugal part company most audibly, so it is worth doing carefully.

In Brazilian Portuguese the pattern is tidy and easy to imitate. A final unstressed o becomes an oo sound: obrigado ends like obrigadoo, livro like livroo. A final unstressed e becomes an ee sound: noite (night) ends in ee, cidade (city) ends in ee, verde (green) ends in ee. A final unstressed a becomes a short, relaxed uh: casa (house) ends closer to cah-zuh than cah-zah. That is the entire rule, and it is why Brazilian Portuguese sounds open and rounded.

In European Portuguese the same vowels shrink much further. An unstressed e becomes a very short central vowel that is often reduced to nearly nothing, so telefone in Lisbon can sound close to tlfon and pequeno (small) close to pquenu. Unstressed a similarly compresses. This is the honest reason European Portuguese strikes learners as clipped, consonant-heavy, and fast: the consonants survive and the unstressed vowels do not. Neither variety is lazier than the other. They simply made different bargains.

Key idea: Unstressed vowels reduce in both varieties, gently in Brazil (final o to oo, final e to ee, final a to uh) and drastically in Portugal, which is why the two sound so different.

The nasal vowels, the language's signature

Now the sound that makes Portuguese Portuguese. A nasal vowel is an ordinary vowel produced with the soft palate lowered so that air escapes through the nose as well as the mouth. English has nasalized vowels but does not use them to tell words apart: say bad and then ban at speed and you will notice the vowel in ban is already leaking through your nose in anticipation of the n. Portuguese takes that leak and makes it the whole point.

Here is a reliable way to find the sound with no audio at all. Say the English word sing slowly, and stop just before your tongue closes for the final consonant, holding the vowel. That humming, nose-forward vowel is the shape you want. Now do the same starting from ah, then eh, then ee, then oh, then oo. Those five are the five Portuguese nasal vowels.

Nasal vowel	Written as	Examples
nasal a	ã, an, am	lã (wool), canta (sings), campo (field)
nasal e	en, em	dente (tooth), tempo (time, weather)
nasal i	in, im	fim (end), tinta (ink), sim (yes)
nasal o	õ, on, om	bom (good), onde (where), põe (puts)
nasal u	un, um	um (one, a), mundo (world), junto (together)

Now the rule that learners most need and most often miss. When m or n closes a syllable, that is, when it comes before another consonant or ends the word, it is not pronounced as a consonant at all. It is a spelling device announcing that the vowel in front of it is nasal. The word sim is not see followed by an m. It is a single nasalized ee, and your lips never close. The word um is not oom. It is a nasalized oo. The word bom is not bome. It is a nasalized oh.

Compare these two-word sets aloud and the system snaps into focus, because when m or n starts the next syllable with a vowel behind it, it really is a consonant and the vowel in front stays oral:

• cama (bed) is ca-ma, oral a plus a real m. canta (sings) is can-ta, nasal a and no separate n.
• ano (year) is a-no, oral a plus a real n. anjo (angel) is an-jo, nasal a and no separate n.
• somos (we are) is so-mos, oral o. sombra (shade) is som-bra, nasal o.

The til, the wave written over ã and õ, does the same job without needing an m or n: irmã (sister), maçã (apple), lã. It is a nasality mark, not a stress mark, though in practice a til usually sits on the stressed syllable.

Key idea: Portuguese has five nasal vowels, written either with a til or with a following m or n; that m or n closes the syllable and is a nasality marker, never a pronounced consonant.

The nasal diphthongs

A nasal vowel can also glide into a nasal semivowel, and the result is the most characteristic sound in the language. There are three common ones plus a famous stowaway.

Spelling	How to build it	Examples
ão	nasal ah gliding into a nasal w	não (no), pão (bread), mão (hand), coração (heart), irmão (brother)
ãe	nasal ah gliding into a nasal y	mãe (mother), pães (loaves), cães (dogs)
õe	nasal oh gliding into a nasal y	põe (puts), lições (lessons), opiniões (opinions)
em at the end of a word	nasal eh gliding into a nasal y	bem (well), tem (has), também (also), alguém (someone)

Two footnotes that will save you confusion later. First, a word-final -am on a verb is pronounced exactly like -ão: falam (they speak) rhymes with the ending of irmão, but the stress is different, because falam is stressed on the first syllable and irmão on the last. Second, the word muito (very, a lot) is nasal even though nothing in its spelling says so: it is pronounced as though it were written muinto. It is the one common word where nasality hides.

Now the practical payoff. Nouns ending in -ão form their plurals in three different ways, and this is one of the few genuinely irregular corners of Portuguese noun morphology.

Plural family	Examples	How common
-ão to -ões	lição to lições, coração to corações, canção to canções, opinião to opiniões	The large majority
-ão to -ães	pão to pães, cão to cães, alemão to alemães, capitão to capitães	A short list worth memorizing
-ão to -ãos	mão to mãos, irmão to irmãos, cidadão to cidadãos, órfão to órfãos	Another short list

Practical advice: if you meet an unfamiliar -ão noun and must guess, guess -ões, because that family is by far the biggest. Then memorize the two short lists, which are mostly everyday words you will meet anyway.

Key idea: The nasal diphthongs ão, ãe, and õe plus word-final -em are the language's acoustic fingerprint, and -ão nouns pluralize three ways, with -ões the safe default.

The oral diphthongs, and one accent that breaks them

The ordinary non-nasal diphthongs are easier, and most have close English equivalents: ai in pai (father) is the i of ice; ei in leite (milk) is the ay of day; oi in dois (two) is the oy of boy; ui in fui (I went) is oo plus ee; au in mau (bad) is the ow of cow; eu in meu (my) is eh plus oo, a combination English lacks; iu in viu (saw) is ee plus oo.

Two Brazilian habits are worth knowing because they are extremely common in speech and never shown in spelling. The diphthong ou is usually flattened to a plain closed o, so sou (I am) sounds like sô and outro (other) like ôtro. And in many words the ei before r flattens too, so primeiro (first) often comes out as priméro. Neither is sloppy; both are standard educated Brazilian speech.

Finally, a beautiful demonstration of what accents are for. When two vowels sit side by side but belong to different syllables, that is a hiatus, and Portuguese often marks it with an accent so you do not read a diphthong by mistake. Compare:

• pais (parents) is one syllable, the diphthong ai. país (country) is two syllables, pa-ís, and the accent is what tells you.
• saudade has the diphthong au. saúde (health) is sa-ú-de, three syllables, split by the accent.

That single accent mark is doing real work: it is the difference between parents and country. Portuguese spelling is not decorating the page. It is talking to you.

Key idea: Oral diphthongs are largely intuitive, Brazilians commonly flatten ou to ô and ei to ê before r, and an accent on i or u signals a hiatus, which is what separates pais from país.

Common misconceptions

• The m in sim and um is pronounced. It is not. It marks the vowel as nasal and your lips never close.
• Nasal vowels are just vowels said through the nose with a heavy accent. They are separate phonemes: they distinguish words, so mistaking one for its oral partner changes what you said.
• Accents in Portuguese only mark stress. The acute and circumflex mark stress and vowel quality, the til marks nasality, and an accent on i or u can mark a hiatus instead.
• Every -ão noun pluralizes the same way. There are three families: lições, pães, and irmãos, and the -ões family is the largest.
• Brazilian and European Portuguese differ mainly in vocabulary. The largest gap is vowel reduction: Portugal compresses unstressed vowels far more than Brazil.

Recap

• i and u have one value each, while stressed a, e, and o each have an open and a closed value that distinguishes real words such as avó and avô.
• The acute accent means open and stressed; the circumflex means closed and stressed.
• Unstressed vowels reduce mildly in Brazil, where final o becomes oo, final e becomes ee, and final a becomes a short uh, and much more drastically in Portugal.
• Five nasal vowels are written with a til or with a syllable-closing m or n, which is a nasality marker and not a pronounced consonant.
• The nasal diphthongs ão, ãe, õe, and word-final -em are the language's signature, and -ão nouns pluralize as -ões, -ães, or -ãos.

Sources

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Portuguese language. britannica.com
2. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese phonology. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Brazilian Portuguese. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Camões, Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua. (n.d.). Língua portuguesa. instituto-camoes.pt

The big picture

Portuguese consonants come in two groups. Most of them are boringly reliable, and a short table of spelling rules will hand you the whole set in twenty minutes. Then there are four that change from city to city, and those four are the reason a Brazilian can hear within one sentence whether you learned your Portuguese in Rio, in São Paulo, or in Lisbon. This lesson teaches both groups honestly, then finishes the sound system with stress and the accent marks.

That last part is the real prize. Portuguese has two default stress rules that between them cover the large majority of words, and one absolutely exceptionless rule about accents. Once you have them, you can look at almost any Portuguese word you have never seen and say it correctly. Very few languages give a beginner that.

The consonants that behave

Start with the free ones. The letters b, f, p, v and the letters m, n before a vowel work exactly as in English. The alphabet has 26 letters, since the 1990 orthographic agreement formally restored k, w, y, which appear only in foreign names, symbols, and abbreviations such as kg and watt. Everything else is governed by rules.

Spelling	Sound	Examples
c before a, o, u	k	casa (house), com (with), cubo (cube)
c before e, i	s	cedo (early), cinco (five)
ç	s, only before a, o, u; never starts a word	França, açúcar (sugar), começar (to begin)
g before a, o, u	hard g	gato (cat), gosto (taste), gula (gluttony)
g before e, i, and j always	zh, the s of measure	gente (people), hoje (today), feijão (bean)
gu, qu before e, i	hard g, k; the u is silent	guerra (war), quero (I want), aquilo (that)
qua, quo	kw	quatro (four), quando (when)
h at the start of a word	always silent	hoje, hora (hour), homem (man)
ch	sh	chave (key), chuva (rain)
lh	the lli of million	filho (son), mulher (woman), trabalho (work)
nh	the ny of canyon	senhor (sir), sonho (dream), amanhã (tomorrow)
s between vowels	z	casa, coisa (thing)
ss between vowels, s elsewhere	s	passo (step), isso (that), sol (sun)

Two of those deserve emphasis. The cedilha under the ç is not decoration: it exists because c says k before a, o, and u, so when a word needs an s sound in that position, the c grows a tail. That is the whole story of começar and açúcar. And h is genuinely silent at the start of every word, which surprises English speakers: hoje begins with the zh sound of its j, not with any breath at all.

The one troublesome letter is x, which has four values that must be learned word by word: sh in peixe (fish), caixa (box), and baixo (low); z in exame (exam) and exercício; ks in táxi and fixo (fixed); and s in próximo (next) and máximo. If you must guess, guess sh, which is the most common.

Key idea: Portuguese spelling is rule-governed: c and g soften before e and i, the cedilha keeps the s sound before a, o, and u, h is silent, and only x has to be learned word by word.

The four consonants that give you away

Now the honest part. Four consonants vary by region, and no version is more correct than another. This course describes the mainstream Brazilian pronunciations first and tells you where they change.

One: t and d before an ee sound. In most of Brazil, including Rio, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and the South, a t before an ee sound becomes the ch of cheese, and a d before an ee sound becomes the j of jeep. So dia (day) is jee-ah, tia (aunt) is chee-ah, noite (night) is noy-chee, and cidade (city) is see-dah-jee. Notice that the trigger is the ee sound, not the letter i, which is why final -te and -de palatalize too: Lesson 2 taught you that final e reduces to ee, and that reduced ee sets this off. In parts of the Northeast and throughout European Portuguese, t and d stay plain, so dia there is dee-ah.

Two: the several r sounds. This is the one learners most need spelled out, because a single letter covers three jobs.

Where the r sits	Mainstream Brazilian sound	Examples
Start of a word, or written rr	an h sound, as in English hat	rua (street), Rio, carro (car), terra (earth)
Between vowels, single r	a quick tap, the tt of American butter	caro (expensive), hora (hour), para (for)
End of a syllable or word	an h sound, or dropped entirely in speech	porta (door), falar (to speak), mar (sea)

So Rio begins with something close to an English h, and carro sounds like kah-hoo. Two regional notes worth having. In the interior of São Paulo state and much of Minas Gerais you will hear the r caipira, a syllable-final r that sounds startlingly like the r of American English car. And in relaxed speech everywhere in Brazil the final r of an infinitive simply disappears: falar becomes falá, comer becomes comê. In Portugal the strong r is instead a sound made far back in the throat, close to the French r.

Three: s at the end of a syllable. In Rio de Janeiro, and also in Belém, Florianópolis, and all of Portugal, a syllable-final s becomes sh. So as casas (the houses) comes out ash cah-zash and está sounds like shtá. This single feature is what most people mean when they say someone has a carioca accent. In São Paulo and most of the rest of Brazil the s simply stays s.

Four: l at the end of a syllable. Across Brazil, a syllable-final l turns into a w. Brasil is brah-ZEEW, mal (badly) is close to English mow, papel (paper) is pah-PEW, and Portugal ends in gaw. In Portugal that l stays a dark l, closer to the l of English full. Of the four regional features, this is the one that most instantly marks a speaker as Brazilian.

Key idea: Four consonants vary regionally: Brazilian t and d palatalize before an ee sound, r has three values with the strong one sounding like h in Brazil, syllable-final s is sh in Rio and Portugal, and syllable-final l is w throughout Brazil.

Stress: two rules and a gift

Every Portuguese word has exactly one stressed syllable, and unlike English, Portuguese will tell you where it is. Two default rules cover the large majority of words.

Rule one. A word ending in a, e, o, am, or em, with or without a final s, is stressed on the next-to-last syllable. That covers an enormous share of the language: casa, livro (book), estudante (student), falam (they speak), homem, casas, livros.

Rule two. A word ending in i, u, l, r, z, im, or um, with or without a final s, is stressed on the last syllable: aqui (here), caju (cashew), papel, falar, feliz (happy), jardim (garden), algum (some).

And now the third rule, which is the gift: a word that disobeys its default rule is required to carry a written accent. That is why café has one, since it ends in e but is stressed on the last syllable, and why fácil (easy) has one, since it ends in l but is stressed on the next-to-last. The accent is not there to be pretty. It is there because the word broke the rule and had to say so.

There is one more piece, and it has no exceptions at all. Any word stressed on the third syllable from the end always carries a written accent. Always. música (music), sábado (Saturday), América, número (number), médico (doctor), rápido (fast), público. Turn that around and you get a powerful reading tool: if a Portuguese word has no accent mark on it, its stress is on one of the last two syllables, and the two default rules will tell you which.

Key idea: Words ending in a, e, o, am, or em are stressed on the next-to-last syllable and words ending in i, u, l, r, z, im, or um on the last; any word that breaks its rule must carry an accent, and every word stressed three syllables from the end always carries one.

The five written marks

You have now met all of them. Here they are together, with the job each one does.

Mark	Written on	What it does	Examples
Acute, á é í ó ú	any vowel	marks stress, and on a, e, o also marks the open value	café, história, água, pó, aqui está
Circumflex, â ê ô	a, e, o only	marks stress plus the closed value	você, avô, português, câmara
Til, ã õ	a and o only	marks nasality, and usually falls on the stressed syllable	irmã, não, mãe, lições
Cedilha, ç	c only	not an accent: makes c say s before a, o, u	França, açúcar, moço
Grave, à	a only	not a stress mark: marks the crase, a fused a plus a	Vou à praia, às três horas

The crase deserves a gentle first introduction, because it looks mysterious and is actually simple arithmetic. Portuguese has a preposition a meaning to or at, and it also has a feminine definite article a meaning the. When the two land next to each other, they fuse and the fusion is written with a grave accent.

• Vou a (I go to) plus a praia (the beach) gives Vou à praia, I am going to the beach.
• The masculine version fuses too, but visibly, so nobody frets about it: a plus o mercado gives ao mercado.

That gives you a test you can use immediately. If swapping in a masculine noun would produce ao, then the feminine version takes à. Vou ao cinema, so Vou à escola. You will also meet it in fixed time phrases: às três horas (at three o'clock), às vezes (sometimes). That is all you need for now. Educated Brazilians argue about the harder cases, and Portuguese II is where those live.

Key idea: The acute and circumflex mark stress and vowel quality, the til marks nasality, the cedilha is a spelling device, and the grave accent marks only the crase, the fusion of the preposition a with the feminine article a.

Common misconceptions

• Portuguese r is rolled like the Spanish rr. In mainstream Brazilian speech the strong r is closer to an English h, and the single r between vowels is a quick tap.
• The h in hoje is pronounced. Word-initial h is always silent in Portuguese; h only does work inside ch, lh, and nh.
• Written accents exist mainly to look decorative. Every accent is doing a job: stress, vowel quality, nasality, or the crase.
• The grave accent marks stress. It does not. It appears only on à and marks the fusion of the preposition a with the feminine article a.
• Everyone in Brazil pronounces dia the same way. Most Brazilians palatalize it to jee-ah, but parts of the Northeast, and all of Portugal, keep a plain d.

Recap

• c and g soften before e and i, the cedilha keeps the s sound before a, o, and u, h is silent, and ch, lh, and nh are single sounds.
• x has four values and must be learned per word, with sh the best default guess.
• Four consonants vary by region: Brazilian t and d before an ee sound, the three values of r, syllable-final s as sh in Rio and Portugal, and syllable-final l as w in Brazil.
• Words ending in a, e, o, am, em take next-to-last stress; words ending in i, u, l, r, z, im, um take last-syllable stress; breaking the rule requires an accent.
• Every word stressed on the third syllable from the end carries an accent, without exception.
• The five marks are the acute, the circumflex, the til, the cedilha, and the grave accent of the crase.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese orthography. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese phonology. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Portuguese language. britannica.com
4. Priberam Informática. (n.d.). Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa. dicionario.priberam.org

The big picture

Textbooks usually open with the verb to be. That is the wrong place to start, because nobody has ever walked into a bakery in Salvador and needed to conjugate anything. What you need first is the ability to open an interaction, be pleasant inside it, and close it without seeming rude. That is maybe forty words, and by the end of this lesson you will have them.

You also need to solve a problem English does not have. English has exactly one word for the person you are talking to: you. Portuguese has at least four, and choosing among them is a live social decision that changes by country, by region, and by who is standing in front of you. Most courses handle this badly, either declaring that Brazilians say você and leaving it there, or teaching the Portuguese tu forms as though Brazil used them. We are going to do it honestly, because the truth is more interesting and more useful.

Greeting by the clock

Portuguese greets you according to the time of day, and the three phrases are used in both countries.

Portuguese	English	When
Bom dia	Good morning, literally good day	From waking until midday
Boa tarde	Good afternoon	Midday until dark, roughly six in the evening
Boa noite	Good evening and also good night	After dark, both arriving and leaving

That last row is the one to watch. English splits the evening greeting from the night farewell, and Portuguese does not: boa noite is what you say walking into a restaurant at eight and also what you say leaving it at eleven. Do not be thrown when someone greets you with what sounds like good night.

Alongside these are the informal openers. In Brazil, oi is the everyday hi: friends, shop assistants, taxi drivers, everyone. Brazilians also answer the telephone with it and use it to mean sorry, what? when they have not heard you. Olá is a shade more neutral and works everywhere in the Lusophone world; in Portugal it is the standard casual greeting, since oi is not really Portuguese usage. Among Brazilian friends you will also hear E aí?, roughly what is up, often extended to E aí, beleza?

Key idea: Bom dia, boa tarde, and boa noite divide the day, boa noite serves as both hello and goodbye after dark, and oi is the Brazilian everyday hi while olá works everywhere.

The Tudo bem ritual

Now the exchange you will hear more than any other in Brazil, and the thing that most delights learners about it: the question and the answer are the same words.

• Tudo bem? literally all well? It means how are you, and it is also the answer.
• Tudo bem. All well. Often extended to Tudo bem, e você? and all well, and you?
• The variant Tudo bom? works identically, and Brazilians will happily answer Tudo bom? with Tudo bem, or the reverse.

Other openers you will meet: Como vai? (how is it going), Como está? (how are you), Como você está?, and the casual Brazilian Beleza? If things are only middling, the honest answer is Mais ou menos, literally more or less, which every Portuguese speaker understands as so-so.

To leave, Brazilians overwhelmingly say tchau, borrowed from the Italian ciao that arrived with Italian immigration to São Paulo. Add até logo (see you later), até amanhã (see you tomorrow), até mais, and até já (see you in a moment). One word needs a warning label: adeus. In Portugal it is an ordinary everyday goodbye. In Brazil it carries the weight of a final parting, the goodbye you say to someone you do not expect to see again. Say tchau in Brazil.

Key idea: Tudo bem serves as both the question and the answer, mais ou menos is the honest middling reply, and tchau is the Brazilian goodbye while adeus in Brazil sounds final.

Courtesy that actually gets used

Five formulas carry almost all of the politeness load.

Portuguese	English	Note
Por favor	Please	In Portugal you will also hear faz favor
Obrigado / Obrigada	Thank you	Agrees with the speaker: a man says obrigado, a woman obrigada
De nada	You are welcome	Brazilians also say Imagina and Por nada
Com licença	Excuse me	Said before: to squeeze past, interrupt, or leave the table
Desculpe / Desculpa	Sorry	Said after: you have already stepped on the foot

The obrigado rule is worth repeating because learners break it daily. It is an adjective meaning obliged, so it agrees with whoever is speaking, never with whoever is being thanked. A man thanking his mother says obrigado. A woman thanking her son says obrigada. In fast speech Brazilians clip it to brigado and brigada, and among friends they often replace it entirely with Valeu!

The com licença and desculpe split maps cleanly onto time: com licença asks permission before the act, desculpe apologizes after it. For something more serious than a bumped elbow, use Sinto muito, I am very sorry, which is also what you say to someone who has been bereaved. And when you walk into a Brazilian shop, the assistant may greet you with Pois não? This literally reads as well, no, and means how can I help you. Portuguese has a sense of humor about its own logic.

Key idea: Obrigado agrees with the speaker's gender, com licença comes before an intrusion and desculpe after it, and Brazilian shop assistants open with Pois não?

The you problem, answered honestly

Portuguese offers several ways to address the person in front of you, and the choice is regional as much as social. Start with the history, because it explains everything. Centuries ago the respectful address was Vossa Mercê, Your Mercy. It wore down in speech to vosmecê and finally to você. Because it began life as a noun phrase like Your Majesty, it still takes third-person verb forms: você fala, exactly like ele fala.

Form	Brazil	Portugal
você	The everyday word for you, with strangers and friends alike, neither formal nor informal	Awkward middle ground; can sound distant, so speakers often avoid a pronoun altogether
tu	Alive in the far South, much of the North and Northeast, and casual Rio speech	The normal informal you, with true second-person endings: tu falas, tu tens, tu és
o senhor / a senhora	Respectful: elders, officials, customers, sometimes parents and in-laws	Same, and used more often than in Brazil
vocês	You plural, universal	You plural, standard informal; os senhores for formal

Two honest complications. First, in most Brazilian regions where tu survives, everyday speech pairs it with third-person verb forms, so people say tu fala rather than the textbook tu falas. Grammarians disapprove; millions of Brazilians do it anyway. Second, você in Brazil is genuinely neutral. It is not the informal counterpart to a formal form, the way French tu opposes vous. It is simply the word for you, and the respectful upgrade when you want one is o senhor or a senhora.

Then there is the pronoun that no textbook mentions and every Brazilian uses: a gente. Literally the people, it means we, and in spoken Brazil it is far more common than nós. Its trick is that it takes a singular verb: a gente vai means we go, using the same verb form as ele vai. Learn it now, because you will hear it constantly.

This course therefore teaches você as your default, shows the tu forms in every conjugation table so that Portugal and southern Brazil are never a mystery, and flags o senhor and a senhora wherever respect is called for. In Brazil, addressing an older stranger as o senhor or a senhora is never wrong. It is the safe move.

Key idea: Você is the neutral Brazilian you and takes third-person verbs, tu is the informal standard in Portugal and survives in parts of Brazil, o senhor and a senhora are the respectful upgrade, and a gente means we with a singular verb.

The subject pronouns

Portuguese	English	Note
eu	I	Not capitalized unless it starts a sentence
tu	you, informal	Portugal, southern and northeastern Brazil
você	you	Brazil's default; takes third-person verbs
o senhor / a senhora	you, respectful	Also takes third-person verbs
ele / ela	he, she, and also it	Everything has a gender in Portuguese
nós	we	Standard, more written and formal in Brazil
a gente	we, colloquial	Takes a singular verb: a gente vai
vocês	you all	Universal plural
eles / elas	they	eles for males or any mixed group, elas for all female

Two notes. Portuguese has no word for it as a subject: things are he or she according to their grammatical gender, which Lesson 6 explains. And because verb endings already identify the subject, the pronoun can often be dropped: Falo português means I speak Portuguese with no eu at all. Portugal drops pronouns freely. Brazil keeps them more often, because Brazilian verb forms have collapsed toward fewer distinct endings and the pronoun does more work.

Introducing yourself

Here is a complete first encounter, glossed line by line. Read it aloud.

• Oi, tudo bem? Meu nome é Ana. Hi, how are you? My name is Ana.
• Muito prazer. Eu me chamo Carlos. Very pleased to meet you. My name is Carlos, literally I call myself Carlos.
• O prazer é meu. De onde você é? The pleasure is mine. Where are you from?
• Sou dos Estados Unidos, de Chicago. E você? I am from the United States, from Chicago. And you?
• Sou brasileiro, de Recife. Você fala português? I am Brazilian, from Recife. Do you speak Portuguese?
• Falo um pouco. Estou aprendendo. I speak a little. I am learning.

To ask a name you can say Qual é o seu nome? or Como você se chama? To present someone else, use Este é for a man and Esta é for a woman: Este é meu amigo João. Esta é minha amiga Maria. And Brazilians commonly slip a definite article in front of first names, so Eu sou a Ana and o João chegou are perfectly normal.

Finally, the phrases that keep a real conversation alive when you are out of your depth. Memorize all six.

• Não entendi. I did not understand.
• Pode repetir, por favor? Can you repeat that, please?
• Mais devagar, por favor. Slower, please.
• Como se diz table em português? How do you say table in Portuguese?
• O que significa isso? What does that mean?
• Como se escreve? How do you spell it?

One cultural note, described rather than demonstrated, since a page cannot rehearse it with you. Brazilian greeting is physical: friends and new acquaintances often exchange beijinhos, light kisses on alternating cheeks, with the number varying by region, one in São Paulo and two in Rio being common patterns. Men who know each other shake hands or exchange an abraço, a hug. In Portugal two kisses is the usual pattern. Follow the lead of the person in front of you.

Key idea: Meu nome é and Eu me chamo both introduce you, Este é and Esta é present someone else, and six survival phrases let you keep a conversation going when you are lost.

Common misconceptions

• Você is the formal you and tu is the informal one. In Brazil você is simply the neutral word for you; the respectful upgrade is o senhor or a senhora.
• Obrigado changes with the person being thanked. It agrees with the speaker, always.
• Boa noite only means good night on leaving. It is also the greeting you use on arriving after dark.
• Adeus is the ordinary word for goodbye. In Portugal yes; in Brazil it sounds like a final parting, so use tchau.
• A gente is slang for people. It is the everyday spoken Brazilian word for we, and it takes a singular verb.

Recap

• Bom dia, boa tarde, and boa noite divide the day, and boa noite works as both hello and goodbye.
• Tudo bem is question and answer at once; tchau is the Brazilian goodbye and adeus sounds final there.
• Obrigado agrees with the speaker; com licença precedes an intrusion and desculpe follows one.
• Você is Brazil's neutral you and takes third-person verbs; tu is Portugal's informal standard and survives regionally in Brazil; o senhor and a senhora are the respectful forms.
• A gente means we with a singular verb and dominates spoken Brazilian Portuguese.
• Meu nome é, Eu me chamo, Muito prazer, and De onde você é carry a first encounter.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese personal pronouns. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Brazilian Portuguese. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Portuguese language. britannica.com
4. Camões, Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua. (n.d.). Língua portuguesa. instituto-camoes.pt

The big picture

English gets by with one verb to be. Portuguese has two, and they are not interchangeable. Ser and estar both translate as am, is, and are, and choosing the wrong one does not merely sound foreign: it can change what you said. Tell a Brazilian Você é bonita and you have said she is a beautiful person. Tell her Você está bonita and you have said she looks lovely tonight, which is a compliment about the dress.

Almost every textbook explains the difference as permanent versus temporary. That rule is easy, memorable, and wrong often enough to get you into trouble. Being dead is permanent, and Portuguese says está morto. Being young is temporary, and Portuguese says é jovem. So we are going to build a rule that actually holds, and then work the contrasts until the choice feels automatic.

The two conjugations

Both verbs are irregular, both are among the most common words in the language, and both are worth memorizing today.

Subject	ser (to be)	estar (to be)
eu	sou	estou
tu	és	estás
você, ele, ela, o senhor, a gente	é	está
nós	somos	estamos
vocês, eles, elas	são	estão

One practical note before you memorize anything. In everyday Brazilian speech, estar loses its first syllable: estou becomes tô, está becomes tá, estamos becomes tamos, and estão becomes tão. You will hear Tô bem for I am fine and Tá bom for okay far more often than the full forms. These clipped versions are spoken, not written, and everyone from bus drivers to professors uses them.

Key idea: Ser goes sou, és, é, somos, são; estar goes estou, estás, está, estamos, estão, and Brazilian speech clips estar to tô, tá, tamos, tão.

A decision rule that holds

Here is the rule. Ser classifies. Estar describes a state.

Ask yourself which question your sentence is answering. If the sentence answers what is this, who is this, what kind of thing is this, and it is putting the subject into a category, use ser. If the sentence answers how is it doing right now, what condition is it in, where is it at the moment, use estar.

Test it against the two cases that broke the permanent rule. Ele está morto, he is dead: dead is not a category of person, it is the state he is currently in, so estar, even though it is permanent. Ela é jovem, she is young: young classifies her, it puts her in a group of people, so ser, even though it is temporary. The rule holds where the shortcut fails.

Ser therefore covers identity and classification:

• Name and identity: Eu sou Carlos. Ela é minha irmã. I am Carlos. She is my sister.
• Occupation: Ele é médico. Somos estudantes. He is a doctor. We are students.
• Nationality and origin: Sou americana. Você é de onde? Sou do Rio. I am American. Where are you from? I am from Rio.
• Defining characteristics: O Brasil é grande. Ela é inteligente. Brazil is big. She is intelligent.
• Material and possession, with de: A mesa é de madeira. O livro é do João. The table is wooden. The book is João's.
• Time and dates: Hoje é segunda-feira. São três horas. É meio-dia. Today is Monday. It is three o'clock. It is noon.
• Where an event takes place: A festa é na minha casa. The party is at my house.

Estar covers current states and current locations:

• Condition and mood: Estou cansado. Ela está feliz hoje. I am tired. She is happy today.
• Where a person or a movable thing is right now: O João está em casa. As chaves estão na mesa. João is at home. The keys are on the table.
• Weather right now: Está frio. Está chovendo. It is cold. It is raining.
• Actions in progress: Estou estudando português. I am studying Portuguese.
• Results of a change: A porta está aberta. O café está pronto. The door is open. The coffee is ready.

That last category, actions in progress, contains a difference you should file away now. Brazil builds the progressive with estar plus a verb ending in -ndo: Estou falando, I am speaking. Portugal builds it with estar a plus the infinitive: Estou a falar. Both mean exactly the same thing, and each sounds odd in the other country.

Key idea: Ser classifies the subject, answering what or who it is; estar reports the state or current location it is in, which is why está morto and é jovem both work.

The contrasts, worked

Some adjectives take either verb, and the choice changes the meaning. These pairs are the heart of the lesson.

With ser	Means	With estar	Means
Ele é chato.	He is a boring, annoying person.	Ele está chato.	He is being annoying today.
Ela é bonita.	She is a beautiful woman.	Ela está bonita.	She looks lovely right now.
A sopa é boa.	Soup, as a dish, is good.	A sopa está boa.	This soup tastes good.
Ele é doente.	He is a chronically ill person.	Ele está doente.	He is sick at the moment.
Ela é nervosa.	She is a nervous, high-strung person.	Ela está nervosa.	She is anxious about something now.
O João é alegre.	João has a cheerful nature.	O João está alegre.	João is in a good mood today.

Read down the two halves of that table and the pattern is unmistakable. With ser you are describing what someone is like. With estar you are reporting how they are doing. Waiters use this constantly: if you say A comida está ótima, you are praising tonight's plate; A comida é ótima praises the restaurant in general.

A useful warning for the Spanish speakers reading this: your instincts here are almost entirely correct, since Spanish makes the same distinction with the same two verbs. The differences are small. The largest is that Portuguese uses ser for the location of an event and adds a third verb, ficar, for the fixed location of places.

Key idea: When an adjective takes both verbs, ser says what the subject is like as a rule and estar says how the subject is doing at this moment.

Ficar, the third player

Portuguese has a verb that quietly takes over a job you might expect estar to do. Ficar is regular and enormously useful, and it has three main senses.

• To be located, for places that do not move: Onde fica a estação? Where is the station? O Brasil fica na América do Sul. Brazil is in South America. Brazilians use ficar here far more than estar.
• To stay or remain: Vou ficar em casa hoje. I am going to stay home today.
• To become, for a change of state: Ele ficou triste. He became sad, he got sad. Fiquei muito feliz. I was very happy, in the sense of I became happy.

Its conjugation is entirely regular: fico, ficas, fica, ficamos, ficam. When you are asking a stranger where something permanent is, Onde fica is the natural Brazilian phrasing, and Onde está is what you use for your keys.

When Portuguese does not use to be at all

Finally, a set of everyday expressions where English says to be and Portuguese refuses. These trip up learners for months, so learn them as fixed phrases now.

English	Brazilian Portuguese	Note
I am hungry	Estou com fome	Literally I am with hunger; Portugal often says tenho fome
I am thirsty	Estou com sede	Same pattern
I am sleepy	Estou com sono	Same pattern
I am cold / hot	Estou com frio / com calor	Está frio describes the weather, not you
I am afraid	Estou com medo	Same pattern
I am in a hurry	Estou com pressa	Same pattern
You are right	Você tem razão	Uses ter, to have, in both countries
I am twenty years old	Eu tenho vinte anos	Age always uses ter, never ser

That last row is the single most common error English speakers make in their first month. Age is something you have in Portuguese, not something you are. Eu sou vinte anos is not a mistake a Brazilian would ever puzzle out; it simply is not Portuguese. Say Eu tenho vinte anos, and ask with Quantos anos você tem?

Key idea: Brazilians use estar com for hunger, thirst, cold, fear, and hurry, and ter for being right and for age: Eu tenho vinte anos, never sou.

Common misconceptions

• Ser is permanent and estar is temporary. The shortcut fails on está morto and é jovem. Ser classifies; estar reports a state.
• Estar is always the verb for location. Estar locates people and movable things, ser locates events, and ficar locates places that do not move.
• Ela é bonita and ela está bonita mean the same thing. The first calls her a beautiful person, the second says she looks lovely right now.
• You can say sou vinte anos for your age. Age uses ter: tenho vinte anos.
• Tô and tá are wrong or lazy. They are the normal spoken forms of estou and está throughout Brazil, used by every social class.

Recap

• Ser: sou, és, é, somos, são. Estar: estou, estás, está, estamos, estão, clipped in speech to tô, tá, tamos, tão.
• Ser classifies the subject: identity, occupation, origin, defining traits, material, time, and where an event happens.
• Estar reports a current state: condition, mood, weather, actions in progress, and where a person or movable thing is.
• With adjectives that take both, ser says what someone is like and estar says how they are doing today.
• Ficar covers fixed locations, staying, and becoming; Onde fica is the natural way to ask where a place is.
• Physical states use estar com in Brazil, and age always uses ter.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese grammar. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Romance copula. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Priberam Informática. (n.d.). Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa: ser, estar, ficar. dicionario.priberam.org
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Portuguese language. britannica.com

The big picture

In Portuguese every noun has a gender. Not just people and animals: a table is feminine, a book is masculine, a hand is feminine, a problem is masculine. This is not a claim about the world. It is a filing system, and once a noun is filed, everything that touches it has to agree: its article, its adjectives, its demonstratives, its possessives. Get the gender wrong and a whole sentence goes slightly out of tune.

The good news is that Portuguese, unlike German, tells you the gender out loud most of the time. The ending of the word is usually the answer, and the exceptions form a list short enough to memorize in an afternoon. Today we do gender, then articles, then the contractions that Portuguese forces on you, then the plurals. It is the most mechanical lesson in the course, and it is the foundation for the next four.

Reading gender off the ending

The headline rule: nouns ending in -o are masculine and nouns ending in -a are feminine. That covers a huge share of the language, and the -o rule is close to airtight: o livro (book), o carro (car), o dinheiro (money), a casa (house), a mesa (table), a janela (window).

Beyond that, several endings are so reliable they are worth learning as a block.

Ending	Gender	Examples
-ção, -são	feminine	a lição (lesson), a estação (station), a decisão (decision)
-dade	feminine	a cidade (city), a verdade (truth), a universidade
-gem	feminine	a viagem (trip), a mensagem (message), a imagem
-eza, -tude	feminine	a beleza (beauty), a natureza (nature), a atitude
-or	masculine	o professor, o amor (love), o calor (heat)
-l, -r, -z	masculine	o papel (paper), o mar (sea), o rapaz (young man)
-ema, -oma	masculine, from Greek	o problema, o sistema, o tema, o cinema, o idioma
-ista	either, by the person	o dentista or a dentista, o artista or a artista

Two rows there deserve a second look. The -ema group is the classic trap: o problema ends in -a and is masculine, because these words came from Greek through Latin and kept their original gender. So it is um problema grande, not uma problema grande. And the -or rule has three famous defectors that every learner meets: a cor (color), a dor (pain), and a flor (flower) are all feminine. Memorize those three as a set and the rest of -or behaves.

The remaining exceptions are few enough to list. Masculine despite ending in -a: o dia (day), o mapa, o planeta, o sofá, o clima. Feminine despite the ending: a mão (hand), a foto, a moto, the last two being clipped forms of the feminine fotografia and motocicleta.

And a small set of nouns changes meaning with gender, which is genuinely useful to know: o capital is money, a capital is a capital city; o rádio is the radio set, a rádio is the radio station; in Brazil o grama is a gram and a grama is the lawn.

Key idea: Nouns in -o are masculine and in -a feminine, with reliable feminine families in -ção, -dade, and -gem and masculine families in -or, -l, -r, -z, and the Greek -ema group; the short exception list includes o dia, o problema, a mão, a cor, a dor, and a flor.

The articles

Portuguese has four definite articles and four indefinite ones, agreeing in gender and number with the noun they precede.

	Masculine singular	Feminine singular	Masculine plural	Feminine plural
the	o livro	a casa	os livros	as casas
a, an, some	um livro	uma casa	uns livros	umas casas

Here is where Portuguese diverges from English: it uses the definite article far more freely. Four habits to absorb.

• With people's first names, especially in casual Brazilian speech and throughout Portugal: a Maria chegou (Maria arrived), o João é meu amigo. It sounds warm, not odd.
• With most country names: o Brasil, os Estados Unidos, a França, o Japão, a China. But a short list takes none: Portugal, Angola, Moçambique, Cabo Verde, Israel. So you go ao Brasil but a Portugal.
• With possessives, optionally: Portugal says a minha mãe, Brazil usually says minha mãe. Both are correct.
• With body parts and clothing, where English uses a possessive: Lavo as mãos, I wash my hands, not I wash the hands.

One place Portuguese drops the article where a learner expects it: after the verb falar with a language. Falo português, not falo o português. But as a subject the article returns: O português é uma língua bonita.

Key idea: The articles agree in gender and number, and Portuguese uses the definite article with names, most countries, and body parts where English does not.

The contractions you cannot avoid

Now a rule that has no English equivalent and no exceptions. When the prepositions de (of, from), em (in, on), a (to, at), or por (by, through) meet a definite article, they fuse. This is not optional style. Writing de o Brasil is simply not Portuguese.

Preposition	+ o	+ a	+ os	+ as
de (of, from)	do	da	dos	das
em (in, on)	no	na	nos	nas
a (to, at)	ao	à	aos	às
por (by, through)	pelo	pela	pelos	pelas

Read that third row again and you will recognize an old friend. The fusion of the preposition a with the feminine article a produces à, which is exactly the crase from Lesson 3. It is not a special mystery; it is one cell in this table.

Some examples in the wild: Sou do Brasil (I am from Brazil), Moro no Rio (I live in Rio), Vou à praia (I am going to the beach), Vou ao mercado (I am going to the market), Passamos pela cidade (we passed through the city), a casa da Maria (Maria's house), o livro do professor (the teacher's book).

That last pair shows something else worth noticing. Portuguese has no apostrophe-s possessive. Ownership is expressed with de plus the owner, which then contracts: Maria's house is literally the house of the Maria, a casa da Maria.

The indefinite articles contract too, though less rigidly: em + um gives num and em + uma gives numa, used in both countries; de + um gives dum, common in Portugal and less often written in Brazil.

Key idea: De, em, a, and por fuse obligatorily with the definite articles to give do, no, ao, and pelo and their feminine and plural partners, and possession is expressed with de plus the owner, as in a casa da Maria.

Making things plural

Portuguese plurals follow the shape of the singular ending. Here is the whole system.

Singular ends in	Rule	Examples
a vowel or a diphthong	add -s	livro to livros, casa to casas, pai to pais
-r, -z, or stressed -s	add -es	professor to professores, luz to luzes, país to países, mês to meses
unstressed -s	no change	o lápis to os lápis, o ônibus to os ônibus
-m	-m becomes -ns	homem to homens, jardim to jardins, um to uns
-al, -el, -ol, -ul	drop the l, add -is with an accent where needed	animal to animais, papel to papéis, lençol to lençóis, azul to azuis
unstressed -il	becomes -eis	fácil to fáceis, difícil to difíceis
-ão	three families	lição to lições, pão to pães, irmão to irmãos

Two of those rows repay a moment. The unstressed -s row means that a handful of common words look identical in both numbers and only the article tells you which you have: o lápis is a pencil, os lápis is pencils. And the -l row explains a spelling that puzzles beginners: papel becomes papéis with an acute accent, because dropping the l leaves the stressed e needing a mark to stay stressed and open.

Finally, remember the pronunciation bonus from Lesson 2: a set of common nouns opens its closed o in the plural. Ovo has a closed o and ovos an open one, and the same happens with porco, osso, and olho. Nobody writes this down. Everybody does it.

Key idea: Vowels take -s, r and z and stressed s take -es, m becomes ns, l becomes is, unstressed s is invariable, and -ão splits into the three families from Lesson 2.

Common misconceptions

• Gender follows meaning. It does not: a mesa is feminine and o livro masculine for reasons of Latin morphology, not because tables are womanly.
• Every noun ending in -a is feminine. O dia, o mapa, o problema, o sistema, and o planeta are all masculine.
• You can write de o Brasil if you prefer. The contractions are obligatory: do Brasil, no Rio, ao mercado, pela cidade.
• Portuguese has an apostrophe-s possessive. It does not. Ownership is de plus the owner: a casa da Maria.
• Every country takes an article. Portugal, Angola, Moçambique, Cabo Verde, and Israel take none, which is why you go ao Brasil but a Portugal.

Recap

• Nouns in -o are masculine and in -a feminine, with dependable families in -ção, -dade, -gem, -or, -l, -r, -z, and the masculine Greek -ema group.
• The short exception list to memorize: o dia, o mapa, o problema, o sistema, a mão, a cor, a dor, a flor.
• Articles are o, a, os, as and um, uma, uns, umas, and Portuguese uses the definite article with names, most countries, and body parts.
• De, em, a, and por fuse with the articles to form do, no, ao, pelo and their partners; à is the crase.
• Possession is de plus the owner: o livro do professor, a casa da Maria.
• Plurals follow the singular ending, with unstressed -s words invariable and -ão nouns splitting three ways.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese grammar. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Priberam Informática. (n.d.). Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa. dicionario.priberam.org
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Portuguese language. britannica.com
4. Camões, Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua. (n.d.). Língua portuguesa. instituto-camoes.pt

The big picture

Lesson 6 filed every noun as masculine or feminine, singular or plural. This lesson is the payoff: adjectives have to match. In English an adjective is a fixed lump of a word, and red is red whether it describes a car or ten houses. In Portuguese the adjective bends to fit: o carro vermelho, a casa vermelha, os carros vermelhos, as casas vermelhas. Four forms, one meaning.

That sounds like extra work, and at first it is. But agreement is also a gift, because it glues a sentence together: when you hear an ending, you already know which noun the speaker is talking about, even if that noun was five words ago. Today: the two adjective families, the special endings, where adjectives go, the colors, and how to compare things.

The two families

Most adjectives fall into one of two groups, and the group is visible in the dictionary form.

Family one: adjectives ending in -o. These have four forms. Swap -o for -a to make them feminine, add -s for the plural.

Adjective	Masc. sing.	Fem. sing.	Masc. plural	Fem. plural
bonito (pretty)	bonito	bonita	bonitos	bonitas
alto (tall)	alto	alta	altos	altas
caro (expensive)	caro	cara	caros	caras

Family two: adjectives ending in -e or in a consonant. These have only two forms, because gender does not change them. Only the plural does.

• grande (big): um livro grande, uma casa grande, livros grandes, casas grandes.
• inteligente, forte (strong), triste (sad), verde (green): same pattern.
• fácil (easy) and difícil: um teste fácil, uma prova fácil, testes fáceis, provas fáceis.
• feliz (happy), jovem (young): um homem feliz, uma mulher feliz, pessoas felizes.

Three endings need their own note, because they gain a feminine form where you might not expect one.

Ending	Feminine	Examples
-or	-ora	trabalhador to trabalhadora (hardworking)
-ês	-esa, and the accent disappears	português to portuguesa, francês to francesa, inglês to inglesa
-ão	-ã	alemão to alemã (German)

Those three cover most nationality words, which brings up a rule English speakers break constantly: nationalities are not capitalized in Portuguese. You write Sou americano, ela é brasileira, um restaurante japonês, all lowercase. Country names keep their capitals; the adjectives made from them do not. The same goes for languages and months: português, janeiro, segunda-feira.

Key idea: Adjectives in -o have four forms, adjectives in -e or a consonant have two, and -or, -ês, and -ão take the feminines -ora, -esa, and -ã; nationality adjectives are never capitalized.

Where the adjective goes

The default position is after the noun, the reverse of English. A big house is uma casa grande, an interesting book is um livro interessante, Brazilian music is música brasileira. If you remember nothing else about position, put the adjective second and you will be right most of the time.

But a small group of adjectives can go in front, and when they do the meaning shifts. These are not stylistic variants. They are different statements.

After the noun	Means	Before the noun	Means
um homem grande	a physically big man	um grande homem	a great man
um amigo velho	an elderly friend	um velho amigo	a longtime friend
um carro novo	a brand-new car	um novo carro	another car, new to me
um homem pobre	a man with no money	um pobre homem	a poor unfortunate man
uma mulher única	a unique woman	a única mulher	the only woman

The pattern behind the table is worth naming: in front of the noun the adjective tends to become subjective and evaluative, while behind the noun it stays literal and classifying. A grande homem is a judgment. A homem grande is a measurement.

Key idea: Adjectives normally follow the noun; a small set may precede it, and when it does the sense turns evaluative, so um grande homem is great and um homem grande is large.

Colors

Portuguese	English	Note
branco, preto	white, black	Standard four-form adjectives
vermelho	red	In Portugal you will also hear encarnado
azul, verde	blue, green	Two forms only: azuis and verdes in the plural
amarelo	yellow	Four forms
marrom	brown, Brazil	Portugal says castanho
cinza	grey, Brazil	Portugal says cinzento; cinza does not change form
laranja, rosa	orange, pink	Invariable, because they are really the fruit and the flower
roxo	purple	Four forms

The invariable ones make sense once you see where they came from: laranja is the orange, rosa is the rose, and a noun pressed into service as a color does not agree. So it is duas camisas laranja, two orange shirts, never laranjas.

One usage note offered plainly. For the color, Brazilians say preto. When describing people, negro and negra are the standard respectful terms in Brazilian public and political language, and they are the words used by Brazil's Black movement and in most journalism. As a learner, follow the terms people use about themselves.

A working vocabulary of description

Here are the pairs you will use every day. Learn them as opposites, which is how memory prefers them.

Portuguese	English	Portuguese	English
bom / boa	good	mau / má	bad
grande	big	pequeno	small
alto	tall, high	baixo	short, low
novo	new, young	velho	old
caro	expensive	barato	cheap
fácil	easy	difícil	difficult
quente	hot	frio	cold
bonito	pretty	feio	ugly
limpo	clean	sujo	dirty
rápido	fast	lento, devagar	slow

Add one word that no dictionary quite captures: legal. In Brazil it is the all-purpose word for cool, nice, or good, applied to films, people, plans, and weather alike. Que legal! means how cool. In Portugal the equivalent is fixe. Its opposite, chato, means boring or annoying and is equally universal.

Comparing things

Comparison is refreshingly regular.

• More than: mais + adjective + do que. Ela é mais alta do que eu. She is taller than I am. Dropping the do is also fine: mais alta que eu.
• Less than: menos + adjective + do que. Este livro é menos caro do que aquele.
• As as: tão + adjective + quanto or como. Ele é tão alto quanto o irmão.
• The most: o or a + mais + adjective + de. Ela é a mais alta da turma. She is the tallest in the class.

Four adjectives have irregular comparatives, exactly as English has better and worse rather than gooder and badder.

Adjective	Comparative	English
bom / boa	melhor	better
mau / má	pior	worse
grande	maior	bigger
pequeno	menor	smaller

Portuguese also has an emphatic superlative built with -íssimo, which means extremely: caríssimo (extremely expensive), bonitíssimo, lindíssimo (gorgeous). Two of these are so common they have become independent words: ótimo (excellent) and péssimo (terrible), the emphatic forms of bom and mau. Brazilians reach for ótimo constantly.

Finally, two traps. First, muito. When it modifies an adjective it is an adverb and never changes: elas são muito bonitas, with muito frozen. When it modifies a noun it is an adjective and must agree: muitas casas, muitos livros, pouca água. Second, bom against bem. Bom is the adjective, bem the adverb: O livro é bom but Ele fala bem. And when someone asks how you are, the answer is Estou bem, not estou bom.

Key idea: Comparatives use mais or menos plus do que, with melhor, pior, maior, and menor irregular; muito is invariable before an adjective but agrees before a noun.

Common misconceptions

• Adjectives go before the noun as in English. The Portuguese default is after the noun, and moving one forward usually changes its meaning.
• Nationalities are capitalized. They are not: brasileiro, português, americano, and japonês are all lowercase, as are languages and months.
• All colors agree. Laranja and rosa never change, because they are nouns doing a color's job.
• Muito always agrees with something. Before an adjective it is an adverb and stays muito; only before a noun does it become muitos or muitas.
• Estou bom is how you say I am fine. The answer is estou bem, because bem is the adverb.

Recap

• Adjectives in -o have four forms; those in -e or a consonant have two; -or, -ês, and -ão take -ora, -esa, and -ã.
• Nationality adjectives, languages, and months are written in lowercase.
• Adjectives normally follow the noun, and the small set that can precede it turns evaluative when it does.
• Laranja and rosa are invariable, marrom and cinza are Brazilian while castanho and cinzento are European.
• Comparison uses mais or menos plus do que, tão plus quanto, and the irregulars melhor, pior, maior, menor.
• Muito is invariable as an adverb and agrees as an adjective; bom is the adjective and bem the adverb.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese grammar. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Priberam Informática. (n.d.). Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa. dicionario.priberam.org
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Portuguese language. britannica.com
4. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Brazilian Portuguese. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

The big picture

This lesson gathers four small systems that turn up in almost every sentence you will ever say: how to have something, how to say that something exists, how to point at things near and far, and how to say whose they are. None is difficult on its own. Together they take you from naming things to talking about them.

Two of the four contain a genuine Brazilian and European split that most courses gloss over, and we will not. Spoken Brazil replaces the formal verb of existence with a completely different one, and spoken Brazil has quietly flattened a three-way pointing system into two. You should know both what the books say and what people actually do.

Ter, the verb of having

Subject	ter	Example
eu	tenho	Tenho um carro. I have a car.
tu	tens	Tens tempo? Do you have time?
você, ele, ela, a gente	tem	Ela tem dois filhos. She has two children.
nós	temos	Temos aula hoje. We have class today.
vocês, eles, elas	têm	Eles têm uma casa. They have a house.

Notice the circumflex on the plural têm. In writing it is the only thing separating he has from they have, and it is not optional. In most Brazilian speech the two sound nearly identical, so the subject does the work your ear cannot.

Ter covers more ground than English have:

• Possession: Tenho um irmão. Você tem carro? Notice that Portuguese often drops the article there, giving Você tem carro? for do you have a car.
• Age, always: Quantos anos você tem? How old are you? Tenho vinte e cinco anos.
• Physical states, especially in Portugal: tenho fome, tenho sede, tenho frio. Brazil prefers estou com fome, but ter razão, to be right, is universal.
• Obligation, with an infinitive: Tenho que estudar, I have to study. Brazil tends to say ter que, Portugal ter de, and both are understood everywhere. This is one of the most useful patterns in the language.

Key idea: Ter goes tenho, tens, tem, temos, têm, and it carries possession, age, physical states, and obligation with ter que plus an infinitive.

Saying that something exists

English has there is and there are, and picks between them by number. Portuguese has há, from the verb haver, and it does not care about number at all.

• Há um problema. There is a problem.
• Há muitas pessoas aqui. There are many people here. Same word, plural meaning.
• Não há tempo. There is no time.

Now the honest part. In everyday Brazilian speech, almost nobody says há. Brazilians use tem instead, in exactly the same invariable way: Tem um problema. Tem muita gente na festa. There is a problem. There are lots of people at the party. This is not slang and not an error; it is how a hundred million people speak and write informally. Há survives in Brazil in writing, journalism, and formal registers, and remains the ordinary spoken choice in Portugal. Learn to recognize both and use tem when you are in Brazil.

Há has a second job that tem does not take over. It expresses elapsed time, translating both English for and English ago.

• Moro aqui há dois anos. I have lived here for two years.
• Ele saiu há dez minutos. He left ten minutes ago.
• Brazilians frequently say the same thing with atrás: dez minutos atrás.

Key idea: Há means both there is and there are and never changes for number, spoken Brazil replaces it with tem, and há also expresses elapsed time in the sense of for and ago.

Pointing: a three-way system

English points twice: this and that. Portuguese points three times, and the third position is genuinely useful once you have it.

Set	Where the thing is	Forms	Neuter
este	near me, the speaker	este, esta, estes, estas	isto
esse	near you, the listener	esse, essa, esses, essas	isso
aquele	far from both of us	aquele, aquela, aqueles, aquelas	aquilo

So in a shop: Este livro aqui is the one in my hands, esse livro aí is the one next to you, and aquele livro ali is the one across the room. The little location words follow the same three-way logic: aqui (here by me), aí (there by you), ali or lá (over there, away from both).

The neuter forms isto, isso, and aquilo never change shape and are used for things whose identity or gender you do not know, and for ideas and situations rather than objects.

• O que é isto? What is this? Said about an unidentified object.
• Isso é verdade. That is true. Said about something the other person just claimed.
• Aquilo foi terrível. That was terrible. Said about a past event.

And now the honest caveat. In spoken Brazil the este and esse distinction has largely collapsed, with esse taking over both jobs. A Brazilian holding a book will very often say esse livro, not este livro, and will say isso where the grammar book wants isto. Written Portuguese, formal Brazilian registers, and European usage all keep the three-way system intact. Learn all three. Expect to hear two.

Finally, the demonstratives contract with prepositions exactly as the articles did in Lesson 6, and these fusions are obligatory too.

Preposition	+ este	+ esse	+ aquele
de	deste, desta, disto	desse, dessa, disso	daquele, daquela, daquilo
em	neste, nesta, nisto	nesse, nessa, nisso	naquele, naquela, naquilo
a	no contraction	no contraction	àquele, àquela, àquilo

Key idea: Este is near the speaker, esse near the listener, and aquele far from both, with the invariable neuters isto, isso, and aquilo; spoken Brazil has largely merged este into esse.

Whose it is

Now the possessives, and one rule governs all of them: a Portuguese possessive agrees with the thing owned, not with the owner. This is the exact opposite of English, where his and her tell you about the owner.

English	Masc. sing.	Fem. sing.	Masc. plural	Fem. plural
my	meu	minha	meus	minhas
your, with tu	teu	tua	teus	tuas
your, with você	seu	sua	seus	suas
our	nosso	nossa	nossos	nossas

Work through the consequence carefully, because it catches everyone. A man says minha casa for my house, because casa is feminine. A woman says meu carro for my car, because carro is masculine. The speaker's own gender is irrelevant. The word bends to the possession.

That leaves a real problem. Seu can mean your, his, her, or their, all four. O seu carro is genuinely ambiguous. Brazilians solve it with a clean division of labor: they reserve seu and sua for your, and express the third person with de plus the pronoun, placed after the noun.

Portuguese	English	Note
o carro dele	his car	de + ele
a casa dela	her house	de + ela
os livros deles	their books, male or mixed group	de + eles
as chaves delas	their keys, all-female group	de + elas

Notice that these four behave the opposite way from meu and seu: dele and dela agree with the owner, exactly like English his and her, and ignore the thing owned. That is why a casa dele is his house and o carro dela is her car.

One last detail. Portugal normally puts an article in front of a possessive, a minha mãe, while Brazil normally leaves it out, minha mãe. Neither is wrong. Both countries understand both.

Key idea: Possessives agree with the thing owned, so a man says minha casa; because seu is ambiguous, Brazilians reserve it for your and use dele and dela, which agree with the owner, for his and hers.

Common misconceptions

• Há changes to hão for plurals. It does not. Há covers both there is and there are.
• Using tem for there is is bad Portuguese. It is the normal spoken Brazilian form, used by everyone; há is the written and European choice.
• Possessives agree with the owner. They agree with the thing owned, which is why a man says minha casa and a woman says meu carro.
• Seu always means your. Grammatically it can mean your, his, her, or their, which is exactly why Brazilians use dele and dela to disambiguate.
• Este and esse are interchangeable everywhere. They are distinct in writing and in Portugal; spoken Brazil has merged them, which is a fact about usage, not about the rules.

Recap

• Ter: tenho, tens, tem, temos, têm, used for possession, age, physical states, and ter que plus an infinitive for obligation.
• Há means there is and there are without changing, and also expresses for and ago; spoken Brazil uses tem instead.
• Este is by me, esse is by you, aquele is far from both, with the invariable neuters isto, isso, and aquilo.
• Demonstratives contract obligatorily: deste, nesse, daquilo, àquele.
• Possessives agree with the thing owned; dele, dela, deles, and delas agree with the owner instead and resolve the ambiguity of seu.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese grammar. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese personal pronouns. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Priberam Informática. (n.d.). Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa: haver, ter. dicionario.priberam.org
4. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Brazilian Portuguese. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

The big picture

Every Portuguese verb you will ever meet belongs to one of three families, and you can tell which by looking at the last two letters of its dictionary form. Verbs ending in -ar, verbs ending in -er, verbs ending in -ir. That is the entire taxonomy. Learn three sets of endings today and you can conjugate thousands of verbs.

Something else happens in this lesson that is worth naming. Until now you have been assembling phrases. From here you can build sentences that do things: I work, she studies, we eat, they travel. The verb is where Portuguese keeps its information about who is acting, which is why the endings matter so much and why the subject pronoun can often be dropped entirely.

The three families

Take the dictionary form, chop off the -ar, -er, or -ir, and you are left with the stem. Then bolt on the ending for the person you want. Here are the three model verbs.

Subject	falar (to speak)	comer (to eat)	partir (to leave)
eu	falo	como	parto
tu	falas	comes	partes
você, ele, ela, a gente	fala	come	parte
nós	falamos	comemos	partimos
vocês, eles, elas	falam	comem	partem

Stare at that table for a moment and two things jump out. First, the eu form ends in -o for all three families, every time, with no exceptions among regular verbs. That is a free gift. Second, the -er and -ir columns are identical except in one cell: comemos against partimos. So you are really learning two and a half conjugations, not three.

Stripped to endings alone:

Family	eu	tu	você, ele, ela	nós	vocês, eles, elas
-ar	-o	-as	-a	-amos	-am
-er	-o	-es	-e	-emos	-em
-ir	-o	-es	-e	-imos	-em

Older grammars add a sixth row for vós, an archaic plural you that survives only in scripture, poetry, and a few corners of northern Portugal. You will meet it in a Bible reading and nowhere else. Ignore it.

The -ar family is by far the largest, holding roughly three quarters of all Portuguese verbs, and it is also where new verbs go. When Brazilians needed a verb for deleting a file they built deletar; for clicking, clicar. Any English verb that gets borrowed arrives wearing an -ar ending, which means that once you know this one pattern you can conjugate words that did not exist ten years ago.

Key idea: Three families, -ar, -er, and -ir; the eu form always ends in -o, the -er and -ir patterns differ only in the nós form, and -ar holds about three quarters of all verbs.

What the present tense actually means

One Portuguese form does the work of several English ones. Eu falo português can be translated as I speak Portuguese, I am speaking Portuguese, or I do speak Portuguese, depending on context. English has three constructions where Portuguese has one, which is a simplification in your favor.

The present also stretches into the near future when a time word makes the meaning clear: Amanhã eu viajo para o Rio, tomorrow I travel to Rio, and O trem chega às oito, the train arrives at eight. English does the same thing.

When you genuinely need to stress that something is happening at this instant, Portuguese has a real progressive, and here the two standards part ways.

• Brazil: estar plus a verb form ending in -ndo. Estou falando, I am speaking. Ela está comendo, she is eating. Estamos aprendendo, we are learning.
• Portugal: estar a plus the infinitive. Estou a falar. Ela está a comer. Estamos a aprender.

The -ndo form is built by swapping the infinitive ending for -ando, -endo, or -indo: falar gives falando, comer gives comendo, partir gives partindo. It is completely regular.

Key idea: The Portuguese present covers I speak, I am speaking, and I do speak, and stretches to the near future; the emphatic progressive is estar plus -ndo in Brazil and estar a plus infinitive in Portugal.

A working vocabulary of verbs

Here are the verbs you will use most, sorted by family. Every one of them is regular in the present tense.

-ar verbs	-er verbs	-ir verbs
falar, to speak	comer, to eat	abrir, to open
morar, to live, reside	beber, to drink	partir, to leave, depart
trabalhar, to work	aprender, to learn	decidir, to decide
estudar, to study	entender, to understand	dividir, to divide, share
gostar, to like	escrever, to write	assistir, to watch
comprar, to buy	vender, to sell	discutir, to argue, discuss
chegar, to arrive	correr, to run	permitir, to allow
tomar, to take, to drink	responder, to answer	desistir, to give up
achar, to think, to find	receber, to receive	existir, to exist
esperar, pagar, ajudar, viajar, cozinhar, dançar, começar	viver, resolver, perceber	insistir, cumprir

Two of those are worth a sentence each. Tomar is the verb Brazilians use for drinking: tomar café is to have a coffee, tomar uma cerveja is to have a beer, and tomar banho is to take a shower. And achar, literally to find, is the everyday word for thinking an opinion: Eu acho que sim, I think so; O que você acha?, what do you think?

The verbs that carry a preposition

Some Portuguese verbs are welded to a preposition, and leaving it out is one of the most audible learner errors. The most important is gostar.

• Gosto de café. I like coffee. Not gosto café. The de is compulsory.
• Você gosta de música brasileira? Do you like Brazilian music?
• And with a contraction: Gosto do Brasil. Gosto da minha casa. Because de plus the article fuses, exactly as Lesson 6 taught.

A short list of others worth learning now:

Verb plus preposition	Meaning	Example
gostar de	to like	Gosto de viajar.
precisar de	to need something	Preciso de ajuda.
morar em	to live in a place	Moro em São Paulo.
pensar em	to think about	Penso em você.
concordar com	to agree with	Concordo com ela.
assistir a	to watch	Assisto a um filme.

Two honest notes on that table. With an infinitive rather than a noun, Brazilians usually drop the de after precisar: Preciso estudar, while Portugal keeps it, Preciso de estudar. And spoken Brazil regularly drops the a after assistir, giving assisto um filme, which grammar books still frown at and everyone says. One more everyday split: to arrive home is chegar em casa in Brazil and chegar a casa in Portugal.

Key idea: Gostar always takes de, and de fuses with any following article, so I like Brazil is Gosto do Brasil.

Regular except in the eu form

A handful of very common verbs behave perfectly except in the first person singular, where either a spelling adjustment or a vowel shift happens. They are worth meeting now rather than being ambushed by them later.

Verb	eu form	Everything else	Why
conhecer, to know a person or place	conheço	conhece, conhecemos, conhecem	c becomes ç to keep the s sound before o
esquecer, to forget	esqueço	esquece, esquecemos, esquecem	same spelling rule
dormir, to sleep	durmo	dorme, dormimos, dormem	the stem o raises to u
preferir, to prefer	prefiro	prefere, preferimos, preferem	the stem e raises to i
sentir, to feel	sinto	sente, sentimos, sentem	the stem e raises to i
pedir, to ask for, to order	peço	pede, pedimos, pedem	d becomes ç

Notice that the first two are not really irregular at all. They are the cedilha rule from Lesson 3 doing its job: c would say k before o, so it grows a tail. Portuguese is being consistent about sound at the cost of looking inconsistent on the page.

Key idea: Verbs like conhecer, dormir, and pedir are regular everywhere except the eu form, where a spelling rule or a vowel shift applies: conheço, durmo, peço.

Common misconceptions

• You need a helper verb to say I am eating. Eu como already means both I eat and I am eating; the progressive is for emphasis.
• Gosto música is acceptable in casual speech. It is not. Gostar requires de: gosto de música, gosto do Brasil.
• The -er and -ir conjugations are entirely different. They differ in exactly one form, the nós form: comemos against partimos.
• Portuguese speakers always state the subject pronoun. The ending identifies the person, so Falo português is a complete sentence; Portugal drops pronouns more freely than Brazil.
• Estou a falar is wrong. It is the standard European progressive; estou falando is the Brazilian one.

Recap

• Verbs sort into -ar, -er, and -ir families; strip the ending to get the stem, then add the personal ending.
• The eu form always ends in -o, and -er and -ir differ only in the nós form.
• The -ar family holds about three quarters of all verbs and absorbs every new borrowing.
• The present covers I speak, I am speaking, and I do speak, and can reach into the near future.
• The emphatic progressive is estar plus -ndo in Brazil and estar a plus the infinitive in Portugal.
• Gostar de, precisar de, morar em, and pensar em carry compulsory prepositions that contract with any article.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese verb conjugation. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese grammar. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Priberam Informática. (n.d.). Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa: conjugação verbal. dicionario.priberam.org
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Portuguese language. britannica.com

The big picture

Here is a comforting piece of arithmetic. Portuguese has thousands of verbs and only about twenty irregular ones that matter, but those twenty appear in something like a third of all the sentences anyone says. They are irregular precisely because they are common: heavy use wears words into odd shapes, in Portuguese exactly as in English, where the most irregular verbs are be, have, go, and do.

So this lesson is a memorization lesson, and it is worth every minute. It also hands you the single most useful shortcut in beginner Portuguese: once you know one of these verbs, ir, you can talk about the future without learning a future tense at all.

The big six

Subject	ir, to go	ter, to have	fazer, to do, make	poder, can	querer, to want	vir, to come
eu	vou	tenho	faço	posso	quero	venho
tu	vais	tens	fazes	podes	queres	vens
você, ele, ela	vai	tem	faz	pode	quer	vem
nós	vamos	temos	fazemos	podemos	queremos	vimos
vocês, eles, elas	vão	têm	fazem	podem	querem	vêm

Three traps are hiding in that table, and all three are about accents.

• tem against têm: the circumflex is the only written difference between he has and they have.
• vem against vêm: the same trick for he comes and they come.
• quer has no final e. He wants is ele quer, never quere.

And one genuine ambiguity worth knowing about rather than fearing: vimos is the nós form of vir, we come, and it is also the past tense we saw from the verb ver. Context sorts it out every time, and native speakers never notice the overlap.

Key idea: ir goes vou, vais, vai, vamos, vão; fazer, poder, querer, and vir all shift their stems in the eu form to faço, posso, quero, and venho; the circumflex distinguishes têm and vêm from tem and vem.

Five more you will need this week

Subject	ver, to see	dar, to give	saber, to know	dizer, to say	pôr, to put
eu	vejo	dou	sei	digo	ponho
tu	vês	dás	sabes	dizes	pões
você, ele, ela	vê	dá	sabe	diz	põe
nós	vemos	damos	sabemos	dizemos	pomos
vocês, eles, elas	veem	dão	sabem	dizem	põem

Two footnotes. Pôr is the only Portuguese infinitive that carries an accent, and it carries it for a reason: without the circumflex it would be indistinguishable from por, the preposition meaning by or through. And the plural of ver is written veem in current spelling; older books print vêem, one of the small changes made by the 1990 orthographic agreement.

The future you already know

Portuguese has a proper future tense: falarei, comerá, viajaremos. You will see it in newspapers, contracts, and speeches. In everyday Brazilian conversation it is close to extinct, and what people actually use is the same construction English uses when it says I am going to study.

The recipe could not be simpler: a present-tense form of ir, plus an infinitive. Nothing in between.

• Vou estudar amanhã. I am going to study tomorrow.
• Ela vai viajar em julho. She is going to travel in July.
• Nós vamos comer agora. We are going to eat now.
• Eles vão chegar tarde. They are going to arrive late.

Spanish speakers, read that again: Spanish inserts a preposition, voy a estudiar, and Portuguese does not. Vou estudar, with nothing between the two verbs. Adding an a is the single most common Spanish interference error in beginner Portuguese.

The same verb also handles going places, where a preposition does appear, and the choice carries meaning. Vou ao mercado uses a plus the article and implies a trip you will return from. Vou para o Brasil uses para and suggests going there to stay. And vamos doubles as let us: Vamos! means let's go, and Vamos comer means either we are going to eat or let's eat, with tone and context deciding.

Key idea: The everyday future is ir plus a bare infinitive, with no preposition between them, and it has almost entirely replaced the simple future in spoken Brazilian Portuguese.

Verbs that lean on other verbs

Several of these irregulars combine with an infinitive to produce the patterns you need for asking, wanting, and being able.

Pattern	Meaning	Example
poder + infinitive	can, to be able, to be allowed	Você pode repetir? Can you repeat that?
querer + infinitive	to want to	Quero aprender português.
saber + infinitive	to know how to	Sei nadar. I know how to swim.
ter que + infinitive	to have to	Tenho que trabalhar hoje.
precisar + infinitive	to need to	Preciso dormir.
ir + infinitive	going to	Vamos sair mais tarde.

Now a small politeness upgrade that will make you sound far more fluent than your grammar warrants. Ordering with Eu quero um café is perfectly normal in Brazil and nobody will think you rude. But two softer forms exist and are worth having:

• Queria um café, por favor. I would like a coffee. A past-tense form used to soften a present request, exactly as English uses I wanted to ask.
• Gostaria de um café. Slightly more formal still. Note the compulsory de after gostaria, since gostar always takes it.

Key idea: Poder, querer, saber, precisar, ter que, and ir all take a bare infinitive; queria and gostaria de are the polite ways to ask for something.

Two verbs for knowing

English uses know for two different jobs, and Portuguese, like most European languages, splits them.

Verb	Used for	Examples
saber	facts, information, and knowing how	Sei que ele mora aqui. Você sabe onde fica o banheiro? Sei falar português.
conhecer	being acquainted with people, places, and works	Conheço a Maria. Conheço o Rio. Você conhece esse livro?

The contrast lands cleanly in one pair. Sei falar português means I know how to speak Portuguese, a skill. Conheço o Brasil means I know Brazil, in the sense of having been there. Say conheço falar and a Brazilian will simply be puzzled.

Fazer, the busiest verb in the language

Fazer means to do and to make, but it also runs a small industry of idioms.

• Faz calor. Faz frio. It is hot. It is cold. Brazilians also say Está calor and Está frio.
• O que você faz? What do you do, meaning both for a living and right now.
• fazer compras, to go shopping; fazer as malas, to pack; fazer uma pergunta, to ask a question.
• Faço anos em maio. My birthday is in May, literally I make years in May.
• Faz dois anos que moro aqui. I have lived here for two years, a twin of the há construction from Lesson 8.

Key idea: Saber is for facts and skills, conhecer for acquaintance with people and places, and fazer carries the weather, occupations, shopping, birthdays, and elapsed time.

Common misconceptions

• Vou a estudar is correct, like Spanish voy a estudiar. Portuguese puts nothing between ir and the infinitive: vou estudar.
• You must learn the simple future to talk about tomorrow. Spoken Brazilian Portuguese uses ir plus infinitive almost exclusively; the simple future is a written register.
• Saber and conhecer are interchangeable. Saber covers facts and skills, conhecer covers acquaintance; sei falar and conheço o Rio are not swappable.
• The accents on têm and vêm are optional. They are the only thing distinguishing the plural from the singular in writing.
• Eu quero is rude in a restaurant. It is normal in Brazil; queria and gostaria de are softer, not corrections.

Recap

• The big six are ir, ter, fazer, poder, querer, and vir, with irregular eu forms vou, tenho, faço, posso, quero, and venho.
• Ver, dar, saber, dizer, and pôr add vejo, dou, sei, digo, and ponho; pôr is the only accented infinitive.
• The everyday future is ir plus a bare infinitive, with no preposition, and it dominates spoken Brazilian Portuguese.
• Poder, querer, saber, precisar, and ter que all take infinitives; queria and gostaria de soften a request.
• Saber is for facts and skills, conhecer for people and places.
• Fazer covers weather, occupation, shopping, birthdays, and elapsed time.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese verb conjugation. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese grammar. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Priberam Informática. (n.d.). Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa: conjugação verbal. dicionario.priberam.org
4. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Brazilian Portuguese. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

The big picture

English makes questions hard. To turn I speak Portuguese into a question you must import a verb that means nothing, do, and rearrange the sentence around it: do you speak Portuguese. Portuguese has no such machinery. You say the sentence and raise your voice at the end. That is the whole system.

Negation is nearly as simple: one word, não, placed in front of the verb. The only complication is that Portuguese, like Spanish and unlike standard English, insists on stacking negatives. I do not see anybody comes out as I do not see nobody, and that is not an error but a requirement. This lesson covers both mechanics, and then the question words that turn a yes-or-no exchange into a real conversation.

Saying no

Put não directly in front of the verb. Nothing else changes.

• Falo francês. I speak French. Não falo francês. I do not speak French.
• Ela come carne. She eats meat. Ela não come carne.
• With a two-verb structure, não goes before the conjugated verb: Não vou sair hoje. I am not going out today. Não posso ajudar. I cannot help.

The same word is also the answer no, which produces a doubling that looks like a stutter and is not: Não, não falo francês. No, I do not speak French. The first não answers the question; the second negates the verb.

Two Brazilian habits are worth recognizing even if you never adopt them. First, an extra não at the end of the sentence, which softens or emphasizes depending on tone: Não sei não and Não quero não are heard constantly, especially in Rio and the Northeast, and the first não sometimes drops entirely, leaving Sei não. Second, in fast speech the preverbal não reduces to something close to num, so num sei is what your ear will actually catch. Neither is written in formal Portuguese, and both are completely normal in speech.

Key idea: Não goes immediately before the verb and also serves as the answer no, which is why Não, não falo is ordinary Portuguese rather than a stumble.

Stacking negatives, on purpose

Portuguese has a set of negative words, and how you use them depends entirely on where they sit relative to the verb.

Word	Meaning	After the verb, with não	Before the verb, without não
nada	nothing	Não tenho nada.	Nada aconteceu. Nothing happened.
ninguém	nobody	Não vejo ninguém.	Ninguém veio. Nobody came.
nunca	never	Não vou nunca.	Nunca vou lá. I never go there.
nenhum, nenhuma	no, none	Não tenho nenhum livro.	Nenhum aluno veio.
nem	nor, not even	Não falo nem inglês nem francês.	Nem eu sei.

The rule is mechanical: if the negative word comes after the verb, you must also put não before the verb. If it comes before the verb, the não is dropped. Não vejo ninguém and Ninguém veio are both correct, and Não ninguém veio is not.

English speakers instinctively want to remove the second negative, since school taught them that two negatives make a positive. Resist it. In Portuguese the second negative is agreement, not arithmetic.

Key idea: A negative word after the verb requires não in front of it; a negative word before the verb replaces it.

How to say yes without saying sim

Portuguese has the word sim and uses it much less than English uses yes. The natural, native way to answer a yes-or-no question is to repeat the verb.

Question	Natural answer	What it means
Você fala português?	Falo.	Yes, I do.
Você gostou do filme?	Gostei.	Yes, I liked it.
Ele veio ontem?	Veio.	Yes, he came.
Você tem tempo?	Tenho, sim.	Yes, I do, with sim for emphasis.
Você quer café?	Não, obrigado.	No, thank you.

Sim is not wrong, and it is used for emphasis, in writing, and when there is no obvious verb to echo. But answering every question with a bare sim is one of the clearest markers of a learner, and switching to the echo pattern will make you sound dramatically more natural in a single afternoon.

Key idea: Portuguese answers yes by repeating the verb of the question, so Você fala português? is answered Falo, with sim reserved for emphasis.

Asking questions

For a yes-or-no question, take the statement and raise your intonation at the end. Nothing is added, nothing is moved.

• Você fala inglês. You speak English. Você fala inglês? Do you speak English?
• Ela mora aqui? Does she live here?
• Vocês vão sair hoje? Are you going out today?

In writing, the question mark is the only signal, which means a Portuguese sentence and its question look identical apart from the final punctuation. Formal and European style sometimes inverts the subject and verb, as in Falas tu inglês, but this is unusual in Brazil and you never need to produce it.

For everything else, there is a question word, and it goes at the front.

Word	Meaning	Example
quem	who	Quem é ela? Who is she?
o que, que	what	O que você quer? Que horas são?
qual, quais	which, what	Qual é o seu nome? Quais você prefere?
onde	where	Onde você mora?
aonde, de onde	to where, from where	Aonde você vai? De onde você é?
quando	when	Quando você chega?
como	how	Como você está? Como se diz isso?
quanto, quantos	how much, how many	Quanto custa? Quantos anos você tem?
por que	why	Por que você está triste?

Two points of usage. Aonde is the form for motion, matching a verb like ir, while onde asks about a static location; in casual Brazilian speech many people use onde for both, and nobody misunderstands. And English lets a preposition dangle at the end of a question, as in who did you go with. Portuguese never does. The preposition stays welded to the question word and moves to the front with it:

• Com quem você foi? With whom did you go?
• Para quem é isso? Who is that for?
• De onde você é? Where are you from?
• Em que você trabalha? What do you work in?

Qual against o que, and the four spellings of why

English uses what in two different jobs and Portuguese splits them. Use o que when you are asking for a definition or an explanation, and qual when you are asking someone to select or specify from a set.

• O que é isso? What is that? You are asking what kind of thing it is.
• Qual é o seu nome? What is your name? You are asking him to specify one from all possible names.
• Qual é o seu telefone? Qual você prefere? Same logic.

English speakers reliably say O que é o seu nome, which is understandable but audibly wrong. Learn the phrase Qual é o seu nome as a fixed block.

Finally, the puzzle every Brazilian schoolchild is drilled on: why has four written forms, and the difference is real.

Form	Job	Example
por que	why, at the start of a question	Por que você está triste?
por quê	why, at the end, before punctuation	Você está triste, por quê?
porque	because, introducing the answer	Porque estou cansado.
porquê	the reason, a noun, usually with an article	Não sei o porquê.

The pattern is easier than it looks: questions take two words, answers take one, and a word at the end of a sentence or standing alone as a noun puts on a circumflex. European Portuguese arranges this slightly differently, generally writing porque for why in questions and porquê at the end, so do not be surprised by a Lisbon newspaper.

One last conversational tool. Brazilians end statements with né?, a worn-down contraction of não é, exactly as English uses right? or isn't it: Você é americano, né? It is everywhere, it fits any sentence, and using it will make you sound like you have been in the country longer than you have.

Key idea: Qual asks you to specify from a set and o que asks what something is; por que opens a question, por quê closes one, porque answers it, and o porquê is the noun.

Common misconceptions

• Não vejo ninguém is a double negative and therefore wrong. It is required. A negative word after the verb demands não in front of it.
• You need a helper verb to ask a question. Portuguese has no do-support; intonation alone turns a statement into a question.
• Answer every yes-or-no question with sim. Native speakers repeat the verb: Falo, Gostei, Tenho.
• What is your name is O que é o seu nome. It is Qual é o seu nome, because you are asking someone to specify from a set.
• Prepositions can be left at the end, as in English. They travel to the front with the question word: Com quem você foi?

Recap

• Não goes in front of the verb and also serves as the answer no.
• Negative words after the verb require não; before the verb they replace it.
• The natural yes is an echo of the verb, with sim kept for emphasis.
• Yes-or-no questions need only rising intonation and a question mark.
• Question words come first, and any preposition travels with them.
• Qual specifies from a set, o que asks what something is, and why has four written forms.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese grammar. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese orthography. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Priberam Informática. (n.d.). Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa: por que, porque. dicionario.priberam.org
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Portuguese language. britannica.com

The big picture

There is a moment in learning any language when it stops being a subject and becomes a tool, and for most people that moment arrives with numbers. Once you can ask a price, understand the answer, agree a time, and say which day, you can buy things, catch buses, and make plans. That is a functioning life, built out of about eighty words.

Portuguese numbers hold two small surprises for English speakers, and both are worth meeting now. Some of them have gender, so two changes shape depending on what you are counting. And the days of the week are named in a way found in no other major European language, for a reason that goes back to a sixth-century bishop.

Counting to a hundred

0-10	11-20	Tens
zero, um, dois, três, quatro, cinco	onze, doze, treze, catorze, quinze	vinte, trinta, quarenta
seis, sete, oito, nove, dez	dezesseis, dezessete, dezoito, dezenove, vinte	cinquenta, sessenta, setenta, oitenta, noventa

The teens from sixteen to nineteen are one of the visible Brazil and Portugal splits: Brazil writes dezesseis, dezessete, dezenove while Portugal writes dezasseis, dezassete, dezanove. Fourteen is catorze in both, though Brazilians also write quatorze.

Compounds are joined with e, and Portuguese keeps that e where English drops it: vinte e um (21), trinta e dois (32), noventa e nove (99). Above a hundred the chain simply continues: cento e cinquenta e três (153).

Then comes gender. Um and dois change to match what they count, and so do the hundreds from two hundred upward.

• um livro but uma casa; dois livros but duas casas.
• duzentos reais but duzentas pessoas; trezentos homens but trezentas mulheres.
• Everything else is fixed: três, quatro, cinco and the rest never change.

Hundreds	Larger
cem (exactly 100), cento e um (101), duzentos, trezentos, quatrocentos, quinhentos	mil (1.000), dois mil, dez mil
seiscentos, setecentos, oitocentos, novecentos	um milhão, dois milhões, um bilhão

Note the split between cem and cento: cem is exactly one hundred, standing alone, while cento appears whenever something follows, as in cento e vinte. And one Brazilian habit will save you real confusion: when reading out digits one at a time, in phone numbers, addresses, and codes, Brazilians replace seis with meia, short for meia dúzia, half a dozen. They do it because seis and três sound alike over a bad connection. So a number read as meia, dois, meia, nove is 6269.

Key idea: Compounds are chained with e, um and dois and the hundreds above two hundred agree in gender, cem stands alone while cento takes a continuation, and Brazilians say meia for six when reading digits.

Money and the real

Before the numbers, the punctuation, because Brazil reverses the English convention. The comma is the decimal separator and the period groups the thousands. So R$ 1.250,50 is one thousand two hundred fifty reais and fifty centavos, and a Brazilian reading 3.14 aloud would be reading three thousand one hundred forty.

Brazil's currency is the real, plural reais, written R$ and divided into a hundred centavos. It was introduced on the first of July 1994 under the Plano Real, the stabilization program that ended years of hyperinflation, and it is one of the few things almost every Brazilian adult can date precisely. Portugal uses the euro; Angola uses the kwanza and Mozambique the metical.

Portuguese	English
Quanto custa? / Quanto é?	How much does it cost? How much is it?
Custa doze reais e cinquenta.	It costs twelve reais fifty.
dinheiro / cartão de crédito / cartão de débito	cash / credit card / debit card
Aceita cartão?	Do you take cards?
o troco	the change
à vista / parcelado	in one payment / in installments
Em quantas vezes?	In how many installments?
É muito caro. / Tem mais barato?	It is very expensive. / Is there anything cheaper?

Two of those rows are culturally loaded. Paying parcelado, in interest-free monthly installments, is a normal part of Brazilian retail rather than a sign of hardship, and a shop assistant asking em quantas vezes? about a pair of shoes is asking a completely ordinary question. And since November 2020 the dominant way to pay small amounts has been Pix, the instant transfer system run by the Banco Central do Brasil, which moves money between accounts in seconds and is accepted by everyone from supermarkets to street vendors.

The ordinals, useful for floors, dates, and rankings, run: primeiro, segundo, terceiro, quarto, quinto, sexto, sétimo, oitavo, nono, décimo. They agree like adjectives, so it is a primeira vez, the first time.

Key idea: The comma is Brazil's decimal point, prices are quoted in reais and centavos, paying parcelado is routine, and Pix has become the everyday payment method.

The days of the week, and why they are strange

Portuguese	English	Literally
domingo	Sunday	the Lord's day
segunda-feira	Monday	second day
terça-feira	Tuesday	third day
quarta-feira	Wednesday	fourth day
quinta-feira	Thursday	fifth day
sexta-feira	Friday	sixth day
sábado	Saturday	the Sabbath

Every other major European language named its weekdays after gods and planets: Monday for the moon, Saturday for Saturn, and in the Romance languages lundi and martes and mercoledì for Luna, Mars, and Mercury. Portuguese threw all of that out. The change is traditionally credited to Martinho de Braga, a bishop in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula in the sixth century, who objected to Christians naming their days after pagan deities and promoted the Church's own numbering, in which the days of Easter week were called feriae, holy days. The numbering stuck and spread across the whole calendar, which is why Portuguese counts its weekdays instead of naming them.

Three practical notes. Monday is the second day because Sunday counts as the first. In speech the -feira is usually dropped, so people say na segunda and até sexta. And the five numbered days are feminine while the two named ones are masculine: a segunda-feira but o sábado. For habits, use the plural or toda: às segundas or toda segunda means on Mondays, while na segunda means this coming Monday. The weekend is o fim de semana.

Months and dates

The months are janeiro, fevereiro, março, abril, maio, junho, julho, agosto, setembro, outubro, novembro, dezembro, and like the days they are written in lowercase.

Dates run day, month, year, joined by de: sete de setembro de 1822, the date Brazil declared independence. Written numerically that is 07/09/2026 for the seventh of September, a genuine trap for American readers, who would parse it as July the ninth. Only the first of the month uses an ordinal: primeiro de janeiro, and then every other day takes a plain cardinal, dois de janeiro, quinze de março. To ask, say Que dia é hoje?

Key idea: Portuguese numbers its weekdays rather than naming them after planets, months and days are lowercase, and dates run day then month then year, with an ordinal only on the first.

Telling time

Ask with Que horas são? The answer uses ser, and the verb agrees with the hour, which is the one thing to watch.

Portuguese	English
É uma hora.	It is one o'clock. Singular, because one hour.
São duas horas.	It is two o'clock. Plural from two onward.
São três e meia.	It is half past three.
São dez e quinze.	It is a quarter past ten.
São quinze para as cinco.	It is a quarter to five.
É meio-dia. / É meia-noite.	It is noon. / It is midnight. Both singular.
São oito em ponto.	It is eight on the dot.

To place an event in the day, add da manhã, da tarde, or da noite: às três da tarde, at three in the afternoon. Portuguese also has a fourth division that English lacks a single word for: a madrugada, the small hours between roughly midnight and dawn. A Brazilian who got home às duas da madrugada got home at two in the morning, and the word carries a faint flavor of having been out too late.

Schedules, timetables, and formal invitations use the 24-hour clock: O voo sai às 18h30, the flight leaves at 18:30, read aloud as dezoito e trinta. To ask when something happens, use A que horas?, as in A que horas você chega?

Key idea: É uma hora is singular and São duas horas plural, meio-dia and meia-noite stay singular, and the day divides into manhã, tarde, noite, and the distinctively Portuguese madrugada.

Common misconceptions

• Portuguese numbers never change form. Um, dois, and the hundreds above two hundred all agree in gender: duas casas, duzentas pessoas.
• R$ 1.250,50 means one and a bit reais. The period groups thousands and the comma is the decimal point, so that is over a thousand reais.
• 07/09 means the seventh of September only in careful writing. Day-month order is the standard everywhere in the Lusophone world.
• Segunda-feira means the second week. It means Monday, the second day, because the count starts with Sunday.
• Every hour takes são. One o'clock, noon, and midnight all take é, because the verb agrees with the number of hours.

Recap

• Compounds join with e, um and dois and the hundreds agree in gender, and Brazilians say meia for six when reading out digits.
• Brazil's comma is the decimal separator and its period groups thousands; the currency is the real, plural reais.
• Paying parcelado is routine in Brazilian retail, and Pix is the everyday instant payment system.
• Weekdays are numbered rather than named after planets, a change credited to Martinho de Braga in the sixth century.
• Days, months, and nationalities are all lowercase, and dates run day, month, year.
• É uma hora against São duas horas, plus manhã, tarde, noite, and madrugada.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Names of the days of the week. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Banco Central do Brasil. (n.d.). Banco Central do Brasil. bcb.gov.br
3. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Brazilian real. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Brazil. britannica.com

The big picture

Food is where a language stops being homework. It is also, in Portuguese, the single richest vein of Brazil and Portugal differences: the same meal, the same fruit, the same cup of coffee will very often have two entirely different names. A Brazilian ordering breakfast in Lisbon and a Portuguese ordering juice in São Paulo will both be understood, but both will be marked instantly as foreign.

So this lesson does three things. It gives you the vocabulary you need to eat well, it walks you through a restaurant visit from the door to the bill, and it introduces the dishes themselves, because you cannot really order feijoada without knowing what arrives.

The meals

Brazil	Portugal	English
o café da manhã	o pequeno-almoço	breakfast
o almoço	o almoço	lunch, traditionally the main meal
o lanche	o lanche	an afternoon snack; in Brazil also a sandwich
o jantar	o jantar	dinner
a sobremesa	a sobremesa	dessert

That last row hides a trap for English speakers, who reasonably read sobremesa as something like supper. It is dessert, and it arrives at the end. The verbs match the nouns: almoçar is to have lunch and jantar is both the noun dinner and the verb to have dinner.

Here are the differences that matter most in a shop or a kitchen. Learn the column that matches where you are.

Brazil	Portugal	English
o suco	o sumo	juice
o abacaxi	o ananás	pineapple
o mamão	a papaia	papaya
o sorvete	o gelado	ice cream
a xícara	a chávena	cup
a geladeira	o frigorífico	refrigerator
o garçom	o empregado de mesa	waiter
o cardápio	a ementa	menu

One row deserves a warning. Presunto means ordinary cooked ham in Brazil, but in Portugal it means dry-cured ham of the prosciutto kind, and the cooked sort is called fiambre. Order a presunto sandwich in Lisbon expecting a Brazilian one and you will get something considerably better and considerably more expensive.

Key idea: The meals are café da manhã or pequeno-almoço, almoço, lanche, jantar, and sobremesa, and food vocabulary is where Brazil and Portugal diverge most.

The Brazilian table

The foundation of everyday Brazilian eating is arroz e feijão, rice and beans, served together at lunch across every region and every income level, usually with a protein and a salad alongside. Everything below sits on top of that base.

Dish	What it is
a feijoada	Black bean stew with cuts of pork, served with rice, collard greens, farofa, and orange slices; a long lunch, traditionally on Wednesdays and Saturdays
o pão de queijo	Small cheese breads from Minas Gerais, made with cassava starch, so naturally free of wheat
a coxinha	A teardrop-shaped croquette of shredded chicken, the classic snack-bar order
o pastel	A thin deep-fried parcel with savory filling, the great food of the street market, drunk with sugarcane juice
o brigadeiro	A truffle of condensed milk and cocoa, present at every Brazilian birthday party
a farofa	Toasted cassava flour, scattered over almost anything for texture
o churrasco	Barbecue, especially the southern rodízio style where waiters carry skewers from table to table
a moqueca	A fish stew, made in Bahia with dendê palm oil and coconut milk, and lighter in Espírito Santo
o acarajé	A black-eyed pea fritter fried in dendê oil, sold in Salvador by women in white; of Yoruba origin and registered as Brazilian cultural heritage
o açaí	An Amazon palm fruit, eaten frozen and sweetened in the south and savory in Pará, where it comes from
a tapioca	A cassava-starch crepe from the Northeast, folded around sweet or savory fillings

For drinking: o cafezinho, the small strong sweet coffee offered to visitors everywhere; o guaraná, a soft drink made from an Amazonian berry; a cerveja and its draft form o chope; a caipirinha, the national cocktail of cachaça, lime, and sugar; and in Rio Grande do Sul o chimarrão, a shared gourd of erva-mate passed from hand to hand.

Portugal's table deserves a paragraph of its own. Its emblem is o bacalhau, salt cod, of which the Portuguese cheerfully claim to have a recipe for every day of the year. Add o pastel de nata, the custard tart; o caldo verde, a soup of kale and potato; and a francesinha, Porto's formidable layered sandwich. Order coffee in Lisbon and you ask for uma bica; order a small draft beer and you ask for uma imperial, which in Porto is um fino.

Key idea: Arroz e feijão is the Brazilian foundation, feijoada, pão de queijo, coxinha, and brigadeiro are the dishes you will meet first, and Portugal's table centers on bacalhau and the pastel de nata.

The words on the plate

Portuguese	English	Portuguese	English
a carne	meat	o pão	bread
o frango	chicken	o queijo	cheese
o peixe	fish	o leite	milk
o camarão	shrimp	a manteiga	butter
o ovo	egg	o açúcar	sugar
a batata	potato	o sal	salt
a salada, a alface	salad, lettuce	a água com gás	sparkling water
o tomate, a cebola, o alho	tomato, onion, garlic	a água sem gás	still water
a laranja, a maçã, a banana	orange, apple, banana	o vinho	wine
o bolo, o doce	cake, sweet	a colher, o garfo, a faca	spoon, fork, knife

A restaurant, from the door to the bill

Here is the whole visit as a script. Read each line aloud and you have most of what you need.

• Uma mesa para dois, por favor. A table for two, please.
• O cardápio, por favor. The menu, please.
• O que você recomenda? What do you recommend?
• Eu queria a moqueca. I would like the moqueca. Softer than eu quero, which is also fine.
• Para mim, o frango, por favor. For me, the chicken, please.
• Sem cebola, por favor. Without onion, please.
• Sou vegetariano. or Sou vegetariana. I am vegetarian. Tenho alergia a amendoim. I am allergic to peanuts.
• Está delicioso! or Que gostoso! This is delicious.
• Mais um, por favor. One more, please.
• A conta, por favor. The bill, please.
• O serviço está incluído? Is service included?

Three practical notes. In Brazil the bill normally carries a ten percent service charge, referred to simply as os dez por cento. It is legally optional and almost always paid, and beyond it there is no American-style tipping culture. To get a waiter's attention, catch their eye or raise a hand and say Por favor or Moço; snapping your fingers is as rude in Brazil as anywhere else.

Second, two Brazilian institutions worth recognizing on a sign. A restaurant advertising por quilo or a quilo is a self-service buffet where you fill a plate and pay by its weight, which is how most Brazilian office workers eat lunch. And o prato feito, usually abbreviated PF, is the standard cheap plate lunch: rice, beans, a protein, salad, and often fries, for a fixed price.

Third, one phrase to say before anyone starts eating: Bom apetite! And if you are hungry enough to say so, Lesson 5 already gave you the words: Estou com fome.

Key idea: Eu queria and para mim order politely, sem plus a noun handles dietary needs, a conta asks for the bill, and Brazilian bills carry an optional ten percent service charge.

Common misconceptions

• Sobremesa means supper. It means dessert.
• Suco and sumo are different drinks. They are the same word for juice, one Brazilian and one European.
• Presunto is the same in both countries. In Brazil it is cooked ham; in Portugal it is dry-cured ham, and cooked ham is fiambre.
• Brazilians tip on top of the service charge. The ten percent on the bill is normally the whole of it; there is no additional expectation.
• Feijoada is simply beans. It is a substantial pork and black bean stew served with rice, collard greens, farofa, and orange.

Recap

• Meals are café da manhã or pequeno-almoço, almoço, lanche, jantar, and sobremesa.
• Suco and sumo, abacaxi and ananás, sorvete and gelado, cardápio and ementa: the same things under two names.
• Arroz e feijão is the Brazilian daily foundation; feijoada, pão de queijo, coxinha, pastel, and brigadeiro are the classics.
• Portugal's table centers on bacalhau, the pastel de nata, caldo verde, and the francesinha.
• Order with eu queria or para mim, restrict with sem, and ask for the bill with a conta, por favor.
• Por quilo restaurants charge by plate weight and a prato feito is the standard fixed plate lunch.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Brazilian cuisine. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese cuisine. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Brazil. britannica.com
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Portugal. britannica.com

The big picture

Two subjects that at first glance have nothing to do with each other belong in the same lesson, because they are what you talk about when a conversation gets past the weather: the people you belong to, and the body you live in. Both come with vocabulary you will use for the rest of your life in the language, and the second comes with something more urgent: the words you need when something is wrong.

The family section also carries the most characteristically Brazilian feature in this whole course, the diminutive. Brazilians attach a small suffix to almost anything, and it is not really about size. It is about warmth, and it is one of the clearest ways a learner starts to sound like a person rather than a textbook.

The family

Male	Female	Plural covering both
o pai, father	a mãe, mother	os pais, parents
o filho, son	a filha, daughter	os filhos, children
o irmão, brother	a irmã, sister	os irmãos, siblings
o avô, grandfather	a avó, grandmother	os avós, grandparents
o neto, grandson	a neta, granddaughter	os netos, grandchildren
o tio, uncle	a tia, aunt	os tios, aunt and uncle
o primo, cousin	a prima, cousin	os primos, cousins
o sobrinho, nephew	a sobrinha, niece	os sobrinhos
o marido, husband	a esposa, wife	o casal, the couple
o sogro, father-in-law	a sogra, mother-in-law	os sogros, parents-in-law
o cunhado, brother-in-law	a cunhada, sister-in-law	os cunhados
o padrinho, godfather	a madrinha, godmother	os padrinhos

The third column is the systematic point. A Portuguese masculine plural covers a mixed group, so os pais means the parents, a father and a mother together, and os irmãos covers brothers and sisters. This is the same rule you met with eles in Lesson 4, applied to nouns.

Notice too that os avós, grandparents, and os avôs, grandfathers specifically, differ only in the accent, which is Lesson 2 quietly proving its worth. Two more small facts: a criança, child, is grammatically feminine no matter the child's sex, and o namorado and a namorada cover boyfriend and girlfriend, upgrading to o noivo and a noiva on engagement.

To talk about it all:

• Você tem irmãos? Do you have siblings? Tenho dois irmãos e uma irmã. Sou filho único. or Sou filha única. I am an only child.
• Você é casado? Are you married? Answer with ser: Sou solteiro (single), casado, divorciado, viúvo (widowed).
• Como se chama a sua mãe? What is your mother's name?
• And a Brazilian courtesy worth knowing: older neighbors and family friends are often addressed as Seu plus a first name for men and Dona plus a first name for women, as in Seu João and Dona Maria. It is warm and respectful at once.

Key idea: The masculine plural covers mixed groups, so os pais is parents and os irmãos is siblings, and marital status takes ser.

The diminutive, and why it is everywhere

Add -inho or -inha to a Portuguese word and it becomes small, but far more often it becomes affectionate, casual, or softened. Brazilians do this constantly, to nouns, adjectives, names, and even adverbs.

Base	Diminutive	What it adds
café	cafezinho	the small strong coffee offered to any visitor
pouco, a little	pouquinho	just a tiny bit, softer and friendlier
minuto	minutinho	Espera um minutinho: warmer than um minuto
João	Joãozinho	affection, and often the younger of two
obrigado	obrigadinho	a light, casual thanks
casa	casinha	a little house, or a house spoken of fondly

The spelling rule is small: after most words you simply add -inho or -inha, but after a stressed vowel or a nasal you insert a z, giving cafezinho, pãozinho, and mãezinha. There is an opposite suffix too, the augmentative -ão, which makes things big or emphatic: carrão is a serious car, amigão is a great friend, and um problemão is a real problem.

Key idea: The suffix -inho and -inha usually signals warmth rather than size, and the augmentative -ão does the opposite; a z appears after a stressed vowel or nasal, as in cafezinho and pãozinho.

The body

Portuguese	English	Portuguese	English
a cabeça	head	o braço	arm
o cabelo	hair	a mão	hand
o rosto, a cara	face	o dedo	finger, and toe as dedo do pé
o olho	eye	o peito	chest
a orelha, o ouvido	outer ear, inner ear and hearing	as costas	back, always plural
o nariz	nose	a barriga, o estômago	belly, stomach
a boca, o dente	mouth, tooth	a perna, o joelho	leg, knee
a língua	tongue, and also language	o pé	foot
a garganta, o pescoço	throat, neck	o coração	heart

Three of those repay attention. As costas is always plural, so your back is grammatically several things. A língua means both tongue and language, which is why Portuguese calls itself a língua portuguesa. And Portuguese separates a orelha, the visible ear, from o ouvido, the inner ear and the sense of hearing, which is why an earache is a dor de ouvido.

There is a grammatical habit here you must copy. With body parts, Portuguese uses the definite article where English uses a possessive, because it is obvious whose body is involved.

• Lavo as mãos. I wash my hands. Not lavo minhas mãos.
• Ele quebrou o braço. He broke his arm.
• Abra a boca. Open your mouth.

When something is wrong

The verb for hurting is doer, and it works the way English aches does: the body part is the subject, not you.

• Dói aqui. It hurts here. Onde dói? Where does it hurt?
• A garganta dói. My throat hurts. Os pés doem. My feet hurt.
• More common still is estar com dor de: Estou com dor de cabeça, I have a headache; dor de garganta, sore throat; dor de barriga; dor de dente.

Portuguese	English
Estou doente. / Não me sinto bem.	I am ill. / I do not feel well.
Estou com febre / tosse / gripe.	I have a fever / a cough / the flu.
a farmácia, o remédio, o comprimido	pharmacy, medicine, tablet
o médico, a médica, a consulta, a receita	doctor, appointment, prescription
o hospital, o pronto-socorro	hospital, emergency room in Brazil; Portugal says as urgências
Preciso de um médico.	I need a doctor.

Now a word that is a genuine hazard between the two countries. In Portugal, estar constipado means to have a head cold, and uma constipação is a cold. In Brazil, constipação means constipation, and a cold is um resfriado. Announcing a constipação in the wrong country will produce a conversation you did not intend to have.

Two facts about Brazilian health care are worth carrying. Brazil runs the SUS, the Sistema Único de Saúde, a public health system created under the 1988 Constitution and free at the point of use, including for foreigners in an emergency. Many Brazilians also hold a private plano de saúde alongside it. And the emergency numbers are worth memorizing before you need them: 190 for the police, 192 for the SAMU ambulance service, and 193 for the fire brigade.

Finally, the words you shout rather than compose: Socorro! (help), Cuidado! (careful), Chame a polícia! (call the police), Estou perdido or Estou perdida (I am lost), and Preciso de ajuda (I need help).

Key idea: Doer takes the body part as subject, estar com dor de names the ache, body parts take the definite article, and constipação is a false friend between Portugal and Brazil.

Common misconceptions

• Os pais means the fathers. The masculine plural covers a mixed group, so it means parents; os irmãos likewise means siblings.
• Diminutives always mean small. More often they signal affection or softness: um minutinho is not shorter than a minute, it is friendlier.
• You say lavo minhas mãos. Portuguese uses the article with body parts: lavo as mãos.
• As costas is a plural of several backs. The word is simply always plural, like English scissors.
• Constipação means the same thing across the Lusophone world. It means a head cold in Portugal and constipation in Brazil, where a cold is um resfriado.

Recap

• Family terms pair by gender, and the masculine plural covers both: os pais, os irmãos, os avós.
• Marital status takes ser: sou solteiro, sou casada.
• The suffix -inho and -inha signals warmth more than size, with a z after a stressed vowel or nasal; -ão is the augmentative.
• As costas is always plural, a língua means both tongue and language, and orelha and ouvido split the English word ear.
• Body parts take the definite article, not a possessive.
• Doer puts the body part in the subject slot, and estar com dor de names the ache; SUS is Brazil's public health system and the emergency numbers are 190, 192, and 193.

Sources

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Brazil. britannica.com
2. Ministério da Saúde, Governo do Brasil. (n.d.). Ministério da Saúde. gov.br
3. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Health care in Brazil. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Brazilian Portuguese. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

The big picture

Everything you have built so far happens now. This lesson lets you talk about what happened, and it opens the door to the most human thing a language does: telling someone what you did.

Portuguese, like Spanish and French, splits the past into two main tenses. One reports completed events, things that happened and finished: I ate, she arrived, we went. The other describes the background, the habitual, and the ongoing: I used to eat, she was arriving. This course teaches the first, the pretérito perfeito, because it is the tense that carries narrative and because you can say a great deal with it alone. The second, the imperfect, is a Portuguese II topic, and the end of this lesson tells you honestly what it does so you know what is waiting.

One piece of good news before the tables. The Portuguese preterite covers more English ground than you would expect. Eu comi translates as I ate and also, in most everyday contexts, as I have eaten. English splits those; Portuguese usually does not.

The regular endings

Subject	falar	comer	partir
eu	falei	comi	parti
tu	falaste	comeste	partiste
você, ele, ela	falou	comeu	partiu
nós	falamos	comemos	partimos
vocês, eles, elas	falaram	comeram	partiram

Two observations will make this stick. First, the stress has moved. In the present tense you say FA-lo; in the preterite you say fa-LEI and fa-LOU, with the weight on the ending. Say the two aloud back to back and you will hear that the tense lives in the stress as much as in the letters.

Second, look at the nós row. falamos, comemos, and partimos are identical to their present-tense forms. Brazilian Portuguese simply lets context decide: Nós falamos português means we speak Portuguese or we spoke Portuguese depending on the sentence around it. European Portuguese distinguishes the -ar case in writing by adding an accent, falámos for the past against falamos for the present, and this is one of the few real spelling differences the 1990 agreement left standing.

Key idea: The preterite endings are -ei, -aste, -ou, -amos, -aram for -ar verbs and -i, -este or -iste, -eu or -iu, -emos or -imos, -eram or -iram for the others, with the stress on the ending.

Spelling changes in the eu form

Three groups of -ar verbs adjust their spelling in the first person singular, and for a reason you already know from Lesson 3: the ending -ei begins with an e sound, which would change how the preceding consonant is pronounced. So the spelling changes in order to keep the sound.

Infinitive ends in	eu form becomes	Examples
-car	-quei	ficar to fiquei, tocar to toquei, explicar to expliquei
-gar	-guei	chegar to cheguei, pagar to paguei, jogar to joguei
-çar	-cei	começar to comecei, almoçar to almocei, dançar to dancei

Notice that the third row loses its cedilha, which is the same logic running backwards: before e the plain c already says s, so the tail is no longer needed. Portuguese is being rigorously consistent about sound and letting the spelling flex around it.

The irregular preterites

These must be memorized, and they are worth the effort, because they are the verbs you will need most.

Verb	eu	você, ele, ela	nós	vocês, eles, elas
ser and ir (both)	fui	foi	fomos	foram
estar	estive	esteve	estivemos	estiveram
ter	tive	teve	tivemos	tiveram
fazer	fiz	fez	fizemos	fizeram
poder	pude	pôde	pudemos	puderam
querer	quis	quis	quisemos	quiseram
ver	vi	viu	vimos	viram
vir	vim	veio	viemos	vieram
dizer	disse	disse	dissemos	disseram
dar	dei	deu	demos	deram
saber	soube	soube	soubemos	souberam
trazer	trouxe	trouxe	trouxemos	trouxeram
pôr	pus	pôs	pusemos	puseram

The very first row is one of the pleasant oddities of Portuguese: ser and ir have exactly the same preterite. Fui ao Rio means I went to Rio and Fui professor means I was a teacher, and no Portuguese speaker has ever been confused by this, because a destination follows one and a description follows the other.

There is also a pattern uniting most of the rest, and spotting it converts a memorization chore into a family resemblance. In regular verbs the preterite stress falls on the ending: fa-LEI, co-MI. In these irregulars the stress falls back onto the stem in the eu and ele forms, and the ending goes quiet: FIZ and FEZ, QUIS, TI-ve and TE-ve, PUS and PÔS, SOU-be, TROU-xe, DIS-se. Grammarians call these the strong preterites, and once you hear the shape you can often guess a new one.

Two accents in that table are load-bearing. Pôde, he could, carries a circumflex that separates it from pode, he can. And pôs, he put, keeps the accent of its infinitive pôr for the same reason.

Key idea: Ser and ir share the preterite fui, foi, fomos, foram, and most other irregulars belong to the strong preterite family, where the stress falls back on the stem: fiz, fez, quis, tive, pus, soube.

Saying when

Portuguese	English
ontem, anteontem	yesterday, the day before yesterday
ontem à noite	last night
hoje de manhã	this morning
na semana passada, no mês passado, no ano passado	last week, last month, last year
há dois dias, dois dias atrás	two days ago, in both the formal and the colloquial phrasing
em 2020, naquele dia	in 2020, on that day

Now a worked narrative. Read each line aloud, then cover the English and read it again.

• Ontem eu acordei às sete horas. Yesterday I woke up at seven.
• Tomei café da manhã e fui trabalhar. I had breakfast and went to work.
• Ao meio-dia almocei com uma amiga num restaurante por quilo. At noon I had lunch with a friend at a por quilo restaurant.
• Ela disse que vai viajar para a Bahia em janeiro. She said she is going to travel to Bahia in January.
• Depois do trabalho, fui ao supermercado e comprei arroz, feijão e frutas. After work I went to the supermarket and bought rice, beans, and fruit.
• Cheguei em casa às sete e fiz o jantar. I got home at seven and made dinner.
• Vi um filme brasileiro e dormi tarde. I watched a Brazilian film and went to sleep late.

Count what is working in those seven lines: regular preterites in three conjugations, the spelling change in cheguei, the shared preterite fui doing duty twice, the irregulars disse, fiz, and vi, past time expressions, and a future embedded inside a past report. That is most of a semester, doing a real job.

Key idea: Ontem, na semana passada, and há dois dias anchor the preterite in time, and a chain of preterites is how Portuguese tells a story.

What this tense does not do

Two honest limits, so that nothing ambushes you later.

First, the imperfect. Portuguese has a second past tense, formed regularly as falava, comia, partia, which handles what English expresses with used to and was doing: Eu falava português quando era criança, I used to speak Portuguese when I was a child. Where the preterite reports an event, the imperfect paints the background. It is not difficult, it is highly regular, and it belongs to Portuguese II. Knowing it exists means you will recognize it when you meet it.

Second, a genuine trap. Portuguese has a compound form that looks exactly like the English present perfect, tenho falado, and it does not mean the same thing. English I have spoken usually reports one completed event, and Portuguese renders that with the plain preterite, falei. The Portuguese tenho falado means something narrower: I have been speaking repeatedly, or lately, up to now. So Eu comi is I ate and I have eaten, while Tenho comido muito means I have been eating a lot recently. English speakers reach for the compound far too often. When in doubt, use the preterite.

Key idea: The imperfect handles habitual and background past and belongs to a later course, and the compound tenho falado means a repeated recent action, not the ordinary English present perfect.

Common misconceptions

• I have eaten needs a compound tense. In most contexts it is simply comi; tenho comido means I have been eating repeatedly.
• Nós falamos can only be present. In Brazilian spelling it is both present and past, and context decides; Portugal writes falámos for the past.
• Fui always means I went. Ser and ir share the same preterite, so it can equally mean I was.
• Cheguei is irregular. It is regular in sound; the u is inserted purely so the g keeps its hard value before the e.
• Pode and pôde are the same word. The circumflex marks the past: he can against he could.

Recap

• The preterite reports completed events and covers both English I ate and, usually, I have eaten.
• Regular endings put the stress on the ending: falei, falou, comi, comeu, parti, partiu.
• The nós form matches the present in Brazilian spelling; Portugal writes falámos for the past.
• Verbs in -car, -gar, and -çar adjust to -quei, -guei, and -cei to preserve the sound.
• Ser and ir share fui, foi, fomos, foram, and the strong preterites pull the stress onto the stem: fiz, quis, tive, pus, soube, trouxe.
• The imperfect and the compound tenho falado do different jobs and belong to a later course.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese verb conjugation. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Portuguese grammar. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Priberam Informática. (n.d.). Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa: conjugação verbal. dicionario.priberam.org
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Portuguese language. britannica.com

The big picture

You began this course unable to read a Portuguese menu. You can now greet someone, introduce yourself, describe a person or a place, choose correctly between ser and estar, conjugate the present tense, talk about the future, ask a question, negate an answer, handle numbers and prices and clock time, order a meal, and tell someone what you did yesterday. That is a first semester, and it is a genuine foundation.

This last lesson is different in kind. Instead of new grammar it gives you the country the language mostly lives in, because vocabulary without culture is a phrasebook, and because the things Brazilians talk about most are the things you will need to talk about too. Then it tells you honestly what you do not yet know and where to go next.

Five Brazils

Brazil is the fifth largest country on Earth by area and home to about 203 million people according to the 2022 census. It is not one place. Brazilians themselves divide it into five official regions, and a Paulista and a Baiano will tell you, cheerfully and at length, how different they are.

Region	Where and what	Cities and marks
Norte	The Amazon basin: largest in area, smallest in population	Manaus, with its rubber-boom opera house; Belém, where açaí comes from
Nordeste	The coast and the semi-arid sertão; the heartland of Afro-Brazilian culture	Salvador, Brazil's first capital; Recife, Fortaleza; forró, frevo, capoeira, Candomblé
Centro-Oeste	Savanna and the Pantanal wetlands; agriculture at scale	Brasília, the planned capital; Goiânia; Cuiabá
Sudeste	About two fifths of the population and most of the economy	São Paulo, the largest city in the Americas; Rio de Janeiro; Belo Horizonte
Sul	The coolest region, shaped by German and Italian immigration	Porto Alegre and gaúcho culture; Curitiba; Florianópolis

One of those entries is worth its own paragraph. Brasília was built from nothing on empty highland and inaugurated in April 1960, to pull the country's center of gravity away from the coast. Lúcio Costa laid out the plan and Oscar Niemeyer designed the buildings, all curves and white concrete, and the result is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the only city of its era listed for its modern architecture. Whether it is a good place to live is a debate Brazilians have never finished.

Key idea: Brazil divides into Norte, Nordeste, Centro-Oeste, Sudeste, and Sul, with the Sudeste holding most of the people and the economy and Brasília built inland from scratch in the 1950s.

The music

No country of comparable size has exported as much music, and the sequence is worth knowing because Brazilians reference it constantly.

Genre	When and where	What it is
choro	Rio, from the 1870s	The first distinctly Brazilian urban music: fast, instrumental, virtuosic
samba	Rio, early twentieth century	Grew in Bahian migrant communities; Pelo Telefone, 1917, is usually called the first recorded samba
bossa nova	Rio, late 1950s	Samba slowed and cooled, with jazz harmony; João Gilberto, Tom Jobim, Vinicius de Moraes
Tropicália	1967 to 1968	Brazilian tradition plugged into electric rock; Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil
MPB	1960s onward	The broad songwriting tradition: Chico Buarque, Elis Regina, Milton Nascimento, Gal Costa
forró	The Northeast	Accordion, triangle, and zabumba drum, for dancing in pairs; Luiz Gonzaga is its king
sertanejo	The interior, now nationwide	Brazil's country music, and today its best-selling genre by a wide margin
funk carioca	Rio's favelas, 1980s onward	Heavy bass and chanted vocals; now a global export

Two of those rows carry political history. Bossa nova gave the world Garota de Ipanema, The Girl from Ipanema, which became one of the most recorded songs ever written and made Brazilian harmony part of the international standard repertoire. And Tropicália collided directly with the military dictatorship that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985: Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were jailed and then pushed into exile in London. Gil returned, kept recording, and served as Brazil's Minister of Culture from 2003 to 2008, which is a career arc few musicians anywhere can match.

This is, of course, exactly the point at which a text course reaches its limit. A page can tell you that bossa nova is samba slowed down and harmonized like jazz; it cannot play you two bars of João Gilberto, which would teach you more in ten seconds. Every artist named here is easy to find, and listening with the lyrics in front of you is the single best study habit you can build after this course.

Key idea: Brazilian popular music runs choro, samba, bossa nova, Tropicália, and MPB, alongside forró, sertanejo, and funk carioca, and Tropicália collided head-on with the 1964 to 1985 dictatorship.

Carnival and the calendar

O Carnaval is the pre-Lenten festival, so its date moves with Easter and usually falls in February or early March. It is not one event but at least three, and they look almost nothing alike.

• Rio de Janeiro: the escolas de samba parade through the Sambódromo, a purpose-built avenue designed by Oscar Niemeyer and opened in 1984. Each school presents an enredo, a theme, with thousands of costumed participants, and is formally judged. Alongside it, hundreds of free street blocos fill the city.
• Salvador: the trio elétrico, a truck carrying a full band and sound system, moves slowly through the streets with an enormous crowd following it, for days. It is one of the largest street parties on Earth.
• Olinda and Recife: frevo, an acrobatic dance performed with a small bright umbrella, and maracatu, with its drums and its royal procession, and the giant papier-mâché puppets that tower over the crowds in Olinda's steep streets.

Two more dates fill out the year. Festa Junina, in June, honors Saints Anthony, John, and Peter with bonfires, corn dishes, checked shirts, and quadrilha square dancing, and is celebrated hardest in the Northeast. And Réveillon, New Year's Eve, brings millions to Copacabana beach dressed in white, many of them setting flowers on the water as an offering to Iemanjá, the sea deity of Candomblé, whose presence in a secular New Year party says a great deal about how Brazilian religion actually works.

Football, and how to talk about it

Brazil is the only country to have won five men's World Cups, in 1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, and 2002, and the only one to have played in every edition of the tournament. Pelé won three of them and is the reference point for the whole sport; Garrincha, Zico, Romário, Ronaldo, and Ronaldinho fill out the list. In the women's game Marta was named world player of the year six times and is the leading scorer in World Cup history counting both tournaments together.

The other essential fact is a defeat. In 1950 Brazil hosted the World Cup and lost the deciding match to Uruguay in the Maracanã in front of a crowd of around two hundred thousand. Brazilians call it the Maracanaço, and three quarters of a century later it is still a national reference for sudden catastrophe.

Portuguese	English
o futebol, o jogo, o gol	football, the match, the goal
o time (Brazil), a equipa (Portugal)	the team
a torcida, torcer para	the fans, to support a team
o campeonato, a Copa do Mundo	the championship, the World Cup
Para que time você torce?	Which team do you support?

That last line is a genuinely useful sentence. Ask it and you will rarely need to think of another conversation topic again.

Key idea: Brazil has won five World Cups and played in every one, Pelé and Marta anchor the men's and women's games, and Para que time você torce? is the most reliable conversation opener in the country.

Books and films

Brazil's greatest novelist is Machado de Assis, who lived from 1839 to 1908, was the grandson of freed slaves, founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters, and wrote Dom Casmurro and Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, books whose narrators are so slyly unreliable that critics still argue about what actually happened in them. After him: Clarice Lispector, Jorge Amado of Bahia, João Guimarães Rosa, and the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

Portugal's tradition runs from Luís de Camões, whose epic Os Lusíadas of 1572 is to Portuguese roughly what Shakespeare is to English, through Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under dozens of invented identities, to José Saramago, the only writer in Portuguese to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1998. Africa contributes Mia Couto of Mozambique and José Eduardo Agualusa and Pepetela of Angola.

On screen, Central do Brasil and Cidade de Deus carried Brazilian cinema abroad around the turn of the century, and in 2025 Walter Salles's Ainda Estou Aqui, released in English as I'm Still Here, won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, Brazil's first win in that category. It is about a family destroyed by the dictatorship, which brings this lesson's threads together.

Beyond Brazil and Portugal

It is easy to forget the other seven countries, so here they are.

• Angola, about 36 million people, is the largest Portuguese-speaking country in Africa, and in Luanda Portuguese is increasingly a first language rather than a second. It exports semba and kizomba.
• Mozambique, about 33 million, uses Portuguese as the language of school and state while dozens of Bantu languages are spoken at home.
• Cabo Verde speaks Cape Verdean Creole at home and Portuguese officially, and gave the world morna, the melancholy song form carried abroad by Cesária Évora and inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage in 2019.
• Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe are both creole-speaking societies with Portuguese as the official language.
• Timor-Leste, independent since 2002, made Portuguese co-official with Tetum, an act as much political as linguistic.
• Macau, on the Chinese coast, keeps Portuguese co-official and has a cuisine that fused the two worlds centuries before anyone called it fusion.

What comes next

Here is what a second semester will teach you, named plainly so you know what you are missing.

• Object pronouns and where they go. This is the largest remaining Brazil and Portugal split: Portugal says chamo-me João, attaching the pronoun after the verb, and Brazil says me chamo João, putting it in front.
• Reflexive verbs: levantar-se, sentar-se, lembrar-se, and the daily-routine vocabulary that comes with them.
• The imperfect, and the art of choosing between it and the preterite.
• The subjunctive, present and past. This is the big one, and it is where Portuguese starts to feel like a language you are inside rather than looking at.
• Commands, the simple future, and the conditional.
• Por against para, two prepositions that both look like for and are not.

And here is how to keep the language alive between now and then, in order of how much they repay you. Listen to Brazilian music with the lyrics printed in front of you. Watch Brazilian films with Portuguese subtitles rather than English ones, so that your reading pulls your listening along. Read something short every day, even a headline. Use a spaced repetition system for vocabulary rather than rereading lists. Find a conversation partner, because thirty minutes of talking beats three hours of studying. And if you can visit a Portuguese-speaking country, go, and say Estou aprendendo português to the first person you meet, because in Brazil that sentence reliably produces patience, encouragement, and a great deal of unsolicited help.

Key idea: Portuguese II brings object pronouns and their placement, reflexives, the imperfect, the subjunctive, commands, and por against para, and the best study habits are music with lyrics, film with Portuguese subtitles, and a conversation partner.

Common misconceptions

• Brazilian culture is one thing. The Norte, Nordeste, Centro-Oeste, Sudeste, and Sul differ in food, music, accent, and history.
• Carnival is a Rio event. Rio's parade, Salvador's trio elétrico, and Olinda's frevo and puppets are three quite different festivals under one name.
• Samba and bossa nova are the same music. Bossa nova is samba slowed and reharmonized with jazz voicings, and it arrived some forty years later.
• Brazil has never lost a World Cup that mattered. The 1950 defeat to Uruguay in the Maracanã is a permanent national reference point.
• Portuguese in Africa is a colonial leftover with few speakers. Angola alone has more than three times the population of Portugal, and in its cities Portuguese is increasingly a first language.

Recap

• Brazil's five regions differ sharply, and Brasília was built inland from nothing and inaugurated in 1960.
• The musical line runs choro, samba, bossa nova, Tropicália, and MPB, beside forró, sertanejo, and funk carioca.
• Carnival means the Sambódromo parade in Rio, the trio elétrico in Salvador, and frevo and giant puppets in Olinda.
• Brazil has won five World Cups, and Pelé and Marta are its defining players.
• Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, Camões, Pessoa, Saramago, and Mia Couto mark the literature, and Ainda Estou Aqui won Brazil its first Academy Award for Best International Feature in 2025.
• Portuguese II brings object pronouns, reflexives, the imperfect, the subjunctive, commands, and por against para.

Sources

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Brazil. britannica.com
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Samba. britannica.com
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Bossa nova. britannica.com
4. Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Brazilian Carnival. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa. (n.d.). CPLP: member states. cplp.org