Pronouns

Manuel offers to help his neighbour with some yard work. This Shorty includes the personal pronoun vós (another pronoun for “you”) and conjugation of verbs in that form. We don’t use vós in most of our content, or in the Verbs section, because it has fallen out of use nowadays, except in specific regions and […]

In today’s episode you’ll learn about a very important preposition — “com”, which means “with” in Portuguese. “Com” can be tricky because of how it combines with personal pronouns. For example, you can’t say “com mi” ❌. You have to say “comigo” ✅ – “with me”. Some pronouns take on a new form like this […]

This Learning Note was designed to serve as a very condensed overview of basic Portuguese grammar. We hope this will help give you a “big picture” view of the language before you dive into the details. You’ll notice there are many links throughout, in case you want to explore a particular topic, or bookmark it […]

Rita realizes that she has quite a bit in common with Marcelo’s siblings! Listen for lots of possessive pronouns and possessive determiners throughout their conversation.

Let’s learn about relative pronouns in Portuguese! Simply put, we use relative pronouns to link parts of a sentence so that we don’t have to repeat ourselves. They connect the dependent clause (someone/something mentioned previously) to the main clause to make it clear who/what we’re referring to. For example, let’s look at these 2 separate […]

In our unit on clitic object pronouns in Portuguese, we discussed where to place clitics within a sentence. More specifically, we talked about whether the clitic goes before the verb, after the verb, or in the middle of the verb. When auxiliary verbs get involved, there are now 2 verbs, so the rules get messy. […]

Luísa and Gaspar make plans for the weekend. Listen for how tonic pronouns are used throughout their conversation.

Yes/No Questions in Portuguese There are a number of different ways to form questions in Portuguese. We’ll start with those for which the answers are either affirmative or negative. These are the easiest Portuguese questions to ask because very few changes have to be made to turn a statement into a question. 1. Add a […]

Now we’ll look at some ways to add emphasis and clarity when using tonic pronouns in European Portuguese. In practice, the context will usually be enough to resolve any confusion, but it’s important to know how to make yourself clear. Adding Próprio or Mesmo When using a tonic pronoun reflexively (meaning it refers back to […]

In this Learning Note, we’ll explore each tonic pronoun and see some examples of how it is used with different prepositions. We’ll explore how certain prepositions can change the form of the pronoun, especially .

We’ve been using subject pronouns for a while (eu, tu, ela, etc.), but there are also a couple other types of personal pronouns you should know about: clitic pronouns – These go with verbs and will be covered in-depth later. tonic pronouns – These go with prepositions and they are our current focus. Different Types […]

To master Portuguese, it is essential that we tackle determiners. As you may recall, we have already learned about a few types of determiners in previous units, such as articles, possessives, and demonstratives. So this will be a good opportunity to review, as well as to be introduced to some new types. In this unit, […]