Gender Agreement

These are three of the simplest, most common words used to talk about quantity in Portuguese: Countable Nouns When talking about countable quantities (which usually end in “-s” in English as well as Portuguese), muito, pouco and algum all change according to gender and number: Uncountable Nouns With uncountable nouns (such as virtues, qualities, or time, […]

are words that describe a noun, assigning it a quality, state, appearance, or other property. In Portuguese, using adjectives requires that you consider the gender and number of the word being modified, as well as the word order of the sentence. Many different types of words can fall into the category of adjectives, including colours, […]

Possessive Determiners vs. Possessive Pronouns In this unit, we’re going to learn about possessive determiners and possessive pronouns in European Portuguese, which both serve the function of expressing possession or ownership of something. In English, these are words like my, your, his, her, their, and our (possessive determiners) and mine, yours, his, hers, theirs, and […]

The preposition can be combined with variable and invariable demonstratives to form a number of very useful contractions. Remember that all the same rules for demonstratives remain valid when they appear in the following contractions. Em + Variable Demonstratives Relative Position Demonstrative Contraction Near the speaker: Near the listener: Away from both: These contractions can be used […]

You learned in The Preposition “De” (from the first Prepositions unit) that de has several different meanings and can be joined together (contracted) with: articles (do, da, dos, das), and pronouns (dele, dela, deles, delas) De + Variable Demonstratives Another very common combination is with demonstratives. Let’s look at the contractions formed by combining with variable demonstratives: […]

As we mentioned, when you say this, that, these, or those in Portuguese, you have to be a little more specific… Variable demonstratives are used to indicate all of the following at once: a person or object’s gender the number (one or more) the position in space or time The gender and number part is […]