The Most Important Verbs

English treats liking as a plain transitive act: « like » takes an object and nothing stands between the two. Gostar refuses that shape. What is liked is never the object of the verb; it arrives through de, which is why the sentence in this list reads gosto muito de peixe. Leave the preposition out and the result is not clumsy but unparsable. The awkward part comes next, because de fuses with whatever follows it: gosto do pão, gosto da cidade, gosto dele, gosto disto. Four contractions, every one of them obligatory, and a learner who has only ever practised de standing alone will produce none of them. Before an infinitive the same joint holds: gosto de ler. And the verb is not alone in this — precisar, a few entries further down, is built the same way, preciso de ajuda, and so is lembrar-se outside this list. The sensible response is to learn each of these verbs together with its preposition, as a single item, because that is how the language stores them and how a speaker retrieves them.