Conjugating regular -ar verbs
Portuguese verbs come in three families, named after the infinitive ending: -ar, -er, -ir. The -ar family is by far the biggest, and it's the most obedient. Learn one set of endings — -o, -a, -amos, -am — and you unlock thousands of verbs at once: falar, morar, trabalhar, estudar, gostar, comprar, escutar.
How to conjugate
Take the infinitive and drop the -ar to get the stem: falar (to speak) → fal-. Then bolt on the ending. eu falo = I speak. você fala / ele fala / ela fala = you speak, he/she speaks. nós falamos = we speak. vocês falam / eles falam / elas falam = you all speak, they speak. The Brazilian chant is short: -o, -a, -amos, -am. And because a gente is the everyday word for 'we', you'll also hear the singular doing plural work: a gente fala = we speak.
Several -ar verbs at once
morar (to live somewhere) → moro, mora, moramos, moram. trabalhar (to work) → trabalho, trabalha, trabalhamos, trabalham. estudar (to study) → estudo, estuda, estudamos, estudam. comprar (to buy) → compro, compra, compramos, compram. escutar (to listen) → escuto, escuta, escutamos, escutam. The pattern never breaks for a regular -ar verb. Watch the stress: it sits on the ending in falamos, but on the stem in falo and fala.
Você — and where tu survives
Brazil runs on você, and você borrows the same verb form as ele and ela: você fala, você mora, você trabalha. That's one form fewer than the books from Portugal give you, where tu takes -as: tu falas, tu moras. You will still meet tu — it's alive in Rio Grande do Sul, in Pará and in parts of the Northeast — but even there most speakers pair it with the você form and say tu fala. So: recognize falas, say fala. For a group it's always vocês falam, never anything else.
Gostar — the verb that needs 'de'
gostar = to like, and it always drags de along in front of whatever you like. Gosto de café = I like coffee. Você gosta de queijo? = Do you like cheese? Ela gosta da Ana = She likes Ana — that's de + a = da, the contraction from lesson 4. Não gostamos de cachorro grande = We don't like big dogs. Never gosto café: something always stands between gostar and its object. To turn up the volume: gosto muito de …, or the one-word version Brazilians reach for, adoro.
The form does triple duty
Falo português covers three English sentences at once: 'I speak Portuguese' (ability), 'I'm speaking Portuguese' (right now) and 'I speak Portuguese every day' (habit). Context sorts it out. When you really want to pin down the right-now reading, Brazil uses estar + the gerund, and the gerund is just the infinitive with -ndo instead of -r: falar → falando, estudar → estudando, trabalhar → trabalhando. Estou falando português. Ela está trabalhando hoje. One more habit to copy now: object pronouns come BEFORE the verb in Brazil — Ela me escuta, and starting a sentence with one is completely normal: Me escuta!
