Die ganze Grammatik

« To be » does an enormous amount of work in English, and Portuguese refuses to let one verb carry it. Ser says what somebody is — origin, job, character, the time of day. Estar says how somebody is at this moment — state, place, mood. Sou alemão stays true; estou cansado passes. Then two more of your « be » sentences leave the family altogether: age, hunger, cold and fear are had rather than been — tenho vinte anos, literally « I have twenty years » — and « there is » and « there are » are one single word, há, which never goes plural. Choosing wrongly between the first two does not produce a mistake. It produces a different sentence, and usually one you would rather not have made.

A Portuguese verb ends in -ar, -er or -ir, and everything else hangs off that. The three sets of endings differ by a single vowel, so learning one of them gets you most of the other two. What matters more is what those endings buy: all six are different and all six are audible, which means the subject pronoun can go. Falo can only be « I speak » and falamos only « we speak ». English has exactly one present ending, the -s of « he speaks », and it is worth noticing early that it lands on the wrong person: here fala is « he speaks » and falas, with the -s, is « you speak ». Reaching for the familiar letter puts you one person off.

English has « the », one word, unchanged for ever. Portuguese has four — o, a, os, as — and four more for « a »: um, uma, uns, umas. That part is short work, because nothing about the following word decides which one you use; only the gender and number of the noun do. The work is elsewhere, and there are two pieces of it. Every preposition fuses with the article into a single word, <b>without exception</b>: de + o is do, em + a is na, a + os is aos, and the unfused form is not a clumsy alternative, it is not Portuguese. And the article turns up in places where English has none — in front of a country, in front of « my », in front of a hand, and in front of a person's first name.

English has no gender at all, so nothing transfers — but there is compensation: the ending usually says which one it is. -o masculine, -a feminine, and that carries four words out of five, which is far more help than most languages give. The real work is the plural. It does not simply add an -s: o animal becomes os animais, o homem becomes os homens, o pão becomes os pães. Anybody who knows only the -s gets half of them wrong, and the half that goes wrong is made of the words that turn up most often — which is exactly the wrong half to get wrong.

A Portuguese adjective agrees with its noun in gender and number — o carro branco, a casa branca, as casas brancas — where English has one shape for everything and never changes it. That part is a new habit rather than a difficult one. The part that costs is the position: the adjective stands <b>after</b> the noun. English has exactly one place for it, in front, and in Portuguese that place is the marked one — it is where an adjective goes to pass judgement rather than to describe. Um homem grande is a large man; um grande homem is a great one. So every adjective you write has to be moved, and moving it back is not a stylistic choice.

The subject pronoun usually disappears, because the verb ending has already said who is speaking. What is left is the object pronouns, and with them comes the decision that separates Portugal from Brazil at a stroke: in Portugal the pronoun hangs on the back of the verb with a hyphen — chamo-me Ana, dá-me o livro — where Brazil puts it in front, me chamo Ana. English attaches nothing to anything, so the hyphen is a new habit rather than a moved one. And the Portuguese rule has an exception so frequent that it is nearly the rule: after a negation, after a question word and after a handful of small words the pronoun slides back to the front. Não me chamo Ana — in Portugal too.

A Portuguese question looks like a statement. Nothing is turned round and no auxiliary is inserted: Falas português? is the same sentence as Falas português. with a question mark and a rising voice. English cannot ask anything without either moving a verb or fetching « do », so the first thing to do is stop reaching for it — and the second is to notice that Portuguese has a filler of its own for the same slot, é que, which is optional, means nothing at all, and is everywhere in speech. The negation is one word before the verb, and it doubles: não vejo nada is « I see nothing », not « I don't see nothing ». Without the não the sentence does not stand.

Portuguese tells a story with a form of its own and needs no auxiliary for it: falei is « I spoke » and « I have spoken » alike. That is the first piece of good news, and it is a large one — there is no « have » to put in front, no participle to look up, and none of the choosing between two auxiliaries that German, French and Italian spend so much effort on. The work is somewhere else: there are <b>two</b> past tenses, and they tell different kinds of thing. The pretérito perfeito sets down events; the imperfeito draws the frame. Chovia e saí — it was raining (frame) and I went out (event). Swap the two tenses and both sentences are still correctly built, and both mean something else.

In conversation the future is almost always ir plus the bare infinitive: vou comer, vais ver. That is your « going to », built with the same verb of motion and emptied of motion in the same way — except that nothing stands between the two words, no a and nothing answering to your « to ». Beside it sits the futuro simples, a single set of endings on the whole infinitive. English has no register split of this kind, so it has to be learnt rather than transferred: that form belongs to newspapers, contracts and forecasts, and in speech its commonest job is not the future at all but the guess. And one thing has no English counterpart whatever: in the future and the conditional a pronoun can be dropped into the middle of the verb — dar-lhe-ei.

English has a single imperative and it never changes: « speak », « don't speak », to a friend, to a stranger, to a crowd. Portuguese cuts that one form in two directions at once, and it is worth seeing the whole shape before learning any of it. The first cut is by person: tu has forms of its own — fala!, come! — while você and o senhor take the subjunctive, fale, coma. The second cut is by polarity, and it applies to tu only: the moment não appears, the form changes — não fales! The polite form does not do that; it is the same word affirmative and negative. One set of endings covers all of it.

English modals are a class apart: « can » takes no <b>-s</b>, has no infinitive, no participle and no future, and the language patches around the holes with « be able to » and « have to ». Portuguese has no such class. Poder, querer, dever and saber are ordinary verbs that conjugate all the way through, and the infinitive follows them bare: posso ajudar, quero comer, sei nadar. No a, no de, and nothing standing in for your « to ». The work is in « must ». There is no single word for it, but three phrases with different weights: ter de is a necessity from outside, dever a duty or a guess, precisar de a need. English also has three — « must », « have to », « need to » — and they do not line up with these three, which is what makes the page worth reading slowly.

Five prepositions carry most of the language: de, a, em, por and para. All five melt into the article that follows, and the melting is obligatory, not casual: de plus o is do and there is no other way to write it. English fuses nothing — « of the » stays two words in every register — so this is a habit to build rather than to transfer. The real work is the choice between por and para. Both are « for » sometimes, and the difference is between a reason and a destination: obrigado por — thank you what for; um presente para ti — a present going where. English has one word for both, which means the distinction has to be learnt from scratch rather than adjusted.

English used to have this. Thou was the familiar form and « you » the respectful one, and by about 1700 the respectful one had swallowed the other. What is left is a language in which the same word addresses a child, a judge and a crowd — and in which politeness is carried entirely by what goes around the pronoun rather than by the pronoun itself. Portuguese kept the distinction and made it three-way. Tu is familiar, among friends and in the family. Você is neutral — polite but not formal, and in Portugal sometimes already too direct towards an older person. O senhor and a senhora are the formal ones. And then there is the way the Portuguese themselves most often solve it: *no pronoun at all*, just the third person and the name. That last one has no counterpart in any English you have ever spoken, and it is the one to learn first.

A reflexive verb carries a pronoun pointing back at the subject: lavo-me, chamo-me, levanto-me. The forms are the object pronouns and the placement is the usual one: attached behind with a hyphen, in front after a negative. Two things make this chapter unfamiliar rather than merely new. English reflexives are heavy — « myself », « himself » — and a heavy word gets used only when the reflexive meaning is the point, so English simply drops it: you wash, you get up, you remember. The Portuguese pronoun is light and stays. And there is a se that points at nobody at all: fala-se português means « Portuguese is spoken here ». There is no subject, and English has no single device that does this — it borrows « one », « you », « they » or the passive instead.

The passive with ser exists and stands in every newspaper: a casa foi vendida. The participle agrees with the subject, like an adjective — as casas foram vendidas, which English participles never do. Spoken Portuguese mostly does something else. Vendeu-se a casa and venderam a casa say the same thing and sound more natural. That is the habit to acquire, because English goes the other way: it makes almost anything the subject of a passive, including the person a thing was given to — « I was told », « she was given a prize ». No Romance language can build those, and here they come out as disseram-me and deram-lhe um prémio. And a porta está fechada is not a passive at all but a state: not what happened to the door but how it is now.

The conjuntivo is not a tense but a stance: it stands wherever something is wished, doubted, feared or demanded — wherever the clause is not being asserted as a fact. English had this and lost almost all of it. Two fossils survive: « if I were you » and the formal « I insist that he be present ». Both feel like set phrases rather than a system, and that is the whole difficulty here — there is no English habit to lean on, only two sentences that happen to preserve the idea. And there are three tenses, the third of which is a Portuguese speciality: the *futuro do conjuntivo*. Quando eu chegar means « when I arrive », and no other Romance language still uses this form in living speech. It is needed after quando, se and assim que — that is, daily.

A se sentence has two halves, and the form of both depends on how likely the condition is. That much is your first, second and third conditional, and the second and third transfer almost untouched. The first does not. English says « if I have time » with a plain present; Portuguese uses the future subjunctive, a form with no English counterpart at all: se tiver tempo, vou. Put the present there instead and the sentence is still grammatical and means something else — a habit rather than an occasion. That is the trap of this whole area, and it is worth meeting it head-on before the other two.

Que introduces almost every subordinate clause: « that », « who », « which », « whose » in most of its uses. Where English chooses between four relative words and can leave all of them out, Portuguese has one invariable word that is never omitted. The real speciality is elsewhere: the *personal infinitive*. Antes de sairmos means « before we leave » — the infinitive takes a personal ending and replaces a whole clause. English does something similar with the -ing form (« before leaving »), but only when there is no separate subject; the moment there is one, English has to open a clause. Portuguese does not, and this form exists in no other Romance language.

The backshift is yours and it carries over whole: a reporting verb in the present moves nothing, one in the past moves everything behind it one step. Diz que está cansado against Disse que estava cansado. That much does not have to be learnt again. What is new sits around it. The listener is hung onto the verb with a hyphen — diz-me — and jumps back in front the moment a não appears. « Say » and « tell » are one verb, and the difference between them is carried by that pronoun. And a reported order becomes an infinitive that can be conjugated, diz-nos para esperarmos, which is the one thing in this chapter English has no way of doing at all.

When two verbs meet here, the second is always an infinitive — never an -ing form, never anything else. What varies is the joint between them: nothing, a or de, decided by the first verb. Quero partir, começo a partir, deixo de fumar. Three things in this chapter have no English shape at all. « Can » comes apart into three verbs according to whether you learnt it, are allowed it or managed it. « I have just arrived » is not an adverb but a verb, acabo de chegar. And the continuous, which English builds with a tense, Portugal builds with a preposition: estou a ler.

Nothing here is a grammar of its own; it is what is left over once the tenses are learnt. A verb built differently from its English counterpart, a verb that does four jobs at once, the marks over the letters, and the small words that make a sentence claim less than it says. The accents are not decoration. Avô is a grandfather and avó a grandmother; pode is « he can » and pôde « he could ». Leave the mark off and you have written another word — one that exists, which is why nothing will underline it in red.