Grammar

Think back to the early days of learning Portuguese… When you started talking about simple likes and dislikes, you probably paused at phrases like and wondered what that was doing there. This was your first encounter with regência (regency), a grammatical principle which relates to how words depend on others to complete their meaning. In […]

The first compound tense we’re going to talk about is the pretérito perfeito composto do indicativo. To keep it short, and since the focus of this unit will just be the indicativo mood, we’ll just call it pretérito perfeito composto. So let’s get to it! As you are likely aware, the pretérito perfeito (simple past […]

Let’s talk about the compound form of modo condicional (conditional mood), which is the mood used for certain hypothetical situations and possibilities. If you need a refresher on the simple form first, check out this Unit, or here are a couple examples to jog your memory: Now, the compound form of the conditional can indicate a […]

Now we’ll turn our attention to the futuro composto do indicativo! (Let’s call it futuro composto for short) As you’re aware, an action in the futuro simples (simple future tense) takes place after the time the utterance is spoken and isn’t related to any other actions. In the futuro composto, however, the future action represented […]

In the Simple Past 2 unit we practiced with some of the most common irregular Portuguese verbs in the simple past (pretérito perfeito do indicativo): ir, ser, estar, dar, and querer.  Now let’s continue with a few more!

Damiana and Joel use objects around the office to show you the various demonstratives (this/that/these/those) and a few common adverbs of place (here/there). Learn which word to use when the object is near the speaker, near the listener, or far from both.

So, what are nominal forms? They are basically verb forms that play a similar role as nouns, adverbs, and adjectives. Unlike other verb forms, they do not indicate tense, mood, or person on their own. Instead, they depend on context (i.e. the surrounding conjugated verbs) to relay that information. The 3 nominal verb forms in […]

The pretérito mais-que-perfeito do indicativo is the tense used to indicate an event that took place in the past before another event. As the name suggests, it’s beyond (“more than”) the pretérito perfeito tense. Unlike with pretérito perfeito, the pretérito mais-que-perfeito’s simple and compound forms both have the same meaning. The compound form we’re going […]

The purpose of this Learning Note is to address a common question we get from learners after they’ve finished our Unit about possessives in European Portuguese. The question is about when to use definite articles before possessive determiners/pronouns, and when they can be dropped. In other words, what’s the difference between Eles são os meus […]

In Compound Tenses 1, we focused on in the indicative and conditional moods. Now we’ll cover compound tenses in the , as well as . Don’t worry, the basic formula is still the same 😉: auxiliary verb ter + past participle of the main verb. Quick Overview Here are the forms we’ll cover in this […]

Up until now, we’ve mostly been working with simple tenses, but now it’s time to explore the various compound tenses in Portuguese. This Learning Note is just an introduction to the general concepts — we’ll cover each one in more detail as you progress through the Unit. What Are Compound Tenses? A Portuguese verb form […]

In Portuguese, when studying narrative texts, we make the distinction between direct and indirect speech. Direct speech is spoken by a character, while indirect speech is spoken by a narrator, in the third-person. Each is clearly defined by different punctuation, but the verb tenses and conjunctions are different too. In real life, everything is technically […]