One of my favorite subjects at school was (Brazilian) Portuguese Language. For some reason, the structures of a language always fascinated me. When we started having English classes, I liked that too. Unfortunately the quality of English education in the school I studied was not really good, so that’s not how I learned how to speak, but it was enough for me to understand some basic grammar and correlate that with the Portuguese one. In the end, I taught myself English by consuming content and talking to people, mostly by practice.
I’ve talked about my struggle learning German before, but I never talked that my girlfriend is also learning Portuguese. Because of that, I’m spending some neurons trying to find ways to explain stuff to her. Brazilian Portuguese is a difficult language. On top of the fact that it’s a romance language with lots of verb conjugation (if you tried to learn Spanish or French you know what I’m talking about), there are two different verbs for to be and the fact that, in my opinion, the formal and informal counterparts of the language are really apart from each other, more so than English or German.
Mind you, of course there are so many slangs and simplifications in those languages too, I have serious problems trying to understand English that some natives speak, some times, but they’ll mostly understand me. In Portuguese, even the structure and the pronoumns change, so that an uneducated person, even knowing how to read, couldn’t understand any written text. And yes, there are functional illiteracy in every language, but in Brazil I don’t know if that’s so common due to the street language being so different, or it being so different because of it.
Anyway, I’ve been assemblying together some pieces that can constitute a small subset of the language that is powerful enough to communicate basic ideas, necessities and desires in a very popular language, that means that literally every Brazilian would understand. I’ll put some basic vocabulary in the end and some example sentences created using it.
Just before starting, I need to say that, if you want to learn Portuguese, you must start with the pronounciation, which is beyond the scope for this text. Portuguese is usually very phonetic, which means that there are rules for how to pronunciate each letter and combination. Even if it’s not as strict as German, for example, I think it’s still pretty straightforward. You’ll likely find many videos explaining that on YouTube.
Pronouns
The complete pronoun list in order to conjugate verbs in Portuguese is, being first, second and third person in singular and plural, respectively:
$$ \begin{cases} 1st-singular & \bold{eu} & I \\ 2nd-singular & \bold{tu} & you\\ 3rd-singular & \bold{ela/ele} & she/he/it \\ 1st-plural & \bold{nós} & we\\ 2nd-plural & \bold{vós} & yous\\ 3rd-plural & \bold{elas/eles} & they \end{cases} $$
However, some of those are never used, or very rarely used. The singular second-person is used in some parts of Brazil, but not very always correctly conjugated, the plural, on the other hand, is even more rare. They’re very commonly replaced by third-person pronouns, like “você” (singular you) and “vocês” (yous, if you might), or even form of address, like “senhor” or “senhora”, for respect addressing. That way, we completely scratch the second-person. Also, the plural first-person is more and more replaced by “a gente”, which is also third-person. So after all of these, we come to a new list of pronouns:
$$ \begin{cases} 1st-singular & \bold{eu} & I \\ \bold{3rd-singular} & \bold{você} & you\\ \bold{3rd-singular} & \bold{ela/ele} & she/he/it \\ \bold{3rd-singular} & \bold{a\ gente} & we\\ \bold{3rd-plural} & \bold{vocês} & yous\\ 3rd-plural & \bold{elas/eles} & they \end{cases} $$
Bringing the total conjugations to memorize from 6 to 3! An example using the verb “comer”, which means “to eat”, in simple present:
$$ normal \begin{cases} 1st & \bold{eu} & como \\ 2nd & \bold{tu} & comes \\ 3rd & \bold{ela/ele} & come \\ 1st & \bold{nós} & comemos \\ 2nd & \bold{vós} & comeis \\ 3rd & \bold{elas/eles} & comem \end{cases} $$
$$ sub \begin{cases} \bold{eu} & como \\ \bold{você/ela/ele/a\ gente} & come \\ \bold{elas/eles/vocês} & comem \end{cases} $$
To make things even easier for the simple present, in most cases, on regular verbs, first and third-person are very similar, with only a different vowel in the end, and the plural third-person goes with a an additional m.
Verb To Be and the Continuous Present
Before going into any verb rule, it’s important to quickly explain a little bit of the most important verbs in Portuguese: “ser” and “estar”. Both of them are translated to “to be”, and sadly there’s no shortcut here. They usually follow the rule of essence and state, but that’s also not a 100% rule, but rather a good guide.
Quick conjugation of those verbs:
$$ ser \begin{cases} \bold{eu} & sou \\ \bold{você/ela/ele/a\ gente} & é \\ \bold{elas/eles/vocês} & são \end{cases} $$
$$ estar \begin{cases} \bold{eu} & estou/tô \\ \bold{você/ela/ele/a\ gente} & está/tá \\ \bold{elas/eles/vocês} & estão/tão \end{cases} $$
The verb estar has some contractions that are used extensively, so I included them too.
Everytime you’re describing an essence of something, you’ll use the verb “ser”, things such a nationality, the look of someone (not how they are currently looking), the profession, everything that describes the essence of something. On the other hand, “estar” is used for state descriptions. And the trick to remember is that estar comes literally from a latin workd that describes state. It’s also the auxiliar to-be verb for continuous present, more on that in a bit.
- Eu sou brasileiro: being of a nationality usually means an essence;
- Ela tá comendo: “she is eating”, continuous present for eating;
- Eles tão vindo: “they are coming”;
- Você é linda: “you’re pretty”, the essence;
- Você tá linda: “you look pretty”, the current state.
Future Tense
As other romance languages, there are many future tenses, many more than necessary. I’ll focus only on the simple future. There’s a beautiful trick that is using the auxiliar verb “ir” (to go) conjugated in the simple present, than use the main verb on the ininitive form, which makes it similar to English. For example, “I will do that”, in the cult language would be “Eu farei isso”, becomes “Eu vou fazer isso”.
The verb “ir”, conjugated in our pronoun table is:
$$ ir \begin{cases} \bold{eu} & vou \\ \bold{você/ela/ele/a\ gente} & vai \\ \bold{elas/eles/vocês} & vão \end{cases} $$
With that, it’s possible to construct any phrase in the future. Ex: “Eu vou comer”, “Você vai trabalhar hoje?”.
For the other futures, I’m afraid there are no shortcuts. But they’re all conditionals or objects (“would do”, “if I do”, “that I do”), for more complex sentence constructions.
Funny thing is that if you want to say “I will go”, you could theoretically use the same verb as an auxiliary and main verb as “Eu vou ir”, but for the sake of brevity, most people just say “Eu vou”. You’re effectively sayng “I go”, but meaning “I will go”. I guess it’s similar in English when you say “I’m coming to the party tonight”.
Past Tense
Turns out the past is one the most complicated thing for simple Portuguese, the two Perfect Past and Imperfect Past are extremely important and communicate a single action or a continuous action, “I did it”, “I used to do it”, “I was doing it”. They are not really mapped one to one to the English counterparts, what makes it a little bit more complicated.
Perfect Past
That’s usually when an action happened once. Something like
Articles
Portuguese has a few more articles than English, but luckily not as many as German! There are the definite and the indefinite articles, two genders and also two numbers (singular and plural), so there’s all the combination of these in total. Numbering is easy in Portuguese, just like English, most of the cases you just have to add an -s in the end:
- O, A, Os, As: definite articles, masculin and feminin respectively, “the”
- Um, Uma, Uns, Umas: indefinite articles, “a”, “some”.
In plural, the masculin is the default form, usually if at least one of the objects described are masculin, the masculin article is used.
Article gendering is the least important aspect of the language, so missing it is really not that important. I’ll describe some tricks to find out the gender of a noun later.
Question Words
As in all the other languages, it’s really important to know the basic question words. With some simplifications, these are the most important ones:
- O que: what; O que você está fazendo?
- Quando: when; Quando ela volta?
- Como: how; Como vocês vêm?
- Quem: who; Quem é você?
- Por que: why; Por que eu?
- Qual: which; Qual seu filme favorito?
- Onde: where; Onde eles estão?
Prepositions
Prepositions connect verbs to objects in different ways. Some verbs will always require a proposition for their main meaning and other won’t, like it happens in any langugage. For example, the verb “gostar” (to like) requires the preposition “de” (of), whereas the verb “amar” (to love) doesn’t. Soyou can say “Eu gosto de você” and “Eu amo você”. Of course, mistakes in prepositions like that, in most cases, are harmless and the interlocutor will understand.
Some prepositions are reducted with the pronoun or the article that comes next. An example here
Also talk about objective pronouns: mim,
Connectors
and, or, etc
Possessive Pronouns
Simple Vocabulary
Verbs
Nouns
Articles…
Adjective & Adverbs
Expressions
“Estou com fome” - I am with hunger