Direct object pronouns and where Brazil puts them
Once you've named something, you stop naming it: English says 'I see her', 'I'm buying it'. Portuguese does the same with a small set of pronouns — me, te, o, a, nos, os, as — and Brazil has one clear habit about where they go: in front of the verb. Te vejo amanhã. Me liga! A gente te encontra no café. Starting a whole sentence with one of these is completely normal here. The hyphenated pattern you may have seen in books from Portugal, vejo-te, is the European default, not ours.
The pronouns
me = me. te = you (one person, informal). o = him / it (masculine). a = her / it (feminine). nos = us. os = them (masculine or mixed). as = them (feminine). There's also vos for 'you all', but treat it as a museum piece: it belongs to the vós paradigm that Brazil doesn't use, and you'll only meet it in old texts, hymns and speeches. For a group, Brazilians say vocês and use os / as — or, far more often, just repeat the noun. Note that o, a, os, as are spelled exactly like the definite articles from lesson 4; position tells them apart, since an article leans on a noun and a pronoun leans on a verb.
Before the verb — the Brazilian default
In Brazil the pronoun goes in front of the verb, and that includes plain positive sentences: Te vejo amanhã = I'll see you tomorrow. Me chama de Pedro = Call me Pedro. A Ana nos conhece = Ana knows us. Eu a encontro na livraria = I meet her at the bookstore. With a negative or a question the pronoun stays exactly where it was: Não te vejo, Onde você me encontra? — which is one thing less to learn than the European system. When two verbs stack up, the pronoun usually slips between them: Vou te ligar = I'm going to call you. Ela quer me ver = she wants to see me.
te and você in the same sentence
Brazil mixes paradigms with a totally clear conscience. The subject is você, but the object pronoun is te: Você me liga e eu te ligo depois. Strict grammar books say você should take o / a or lhe, and that's what you'll see in formal writing — but te is what a hundred million people say every day, in every region, to friends, coworkers and shop assistants alike. Learn it as a fixed pair: te for the person you're talking to, me for yourself. The classic sentence in the country is exactly this shape: Te amo.
o, a, os, as — the careful forms
o and a are the 'him/her/it' pronouns, and they're alive and well in writing, news reading and formal speech: Eu o conheço bem. A gente as encontra no café. When one of them lands after a verb form ending in -r, -s or -z, that consonant drops and the pronoun grows an l: comprar + o = comprá-lo, ler + a = lê-la, comemos + os = comemo-los. You'll read Vou comprá-lo amanhã on a page and hear Vou comprar amanhã in the street. Don't drill the spellings today — just recognize them when they appear.
What Brazilians actually say
Two everyday moves replace o and a in speech. First, the subject pronouns do object duty: Eu vejo ele, Eu conheço ela, A gente encontra eles no café. Teachers frown, formal writing avoids it, and everyone says it. Second — even more common — the object simply disappears when it's obvious: — Você comprou o livro? — Comprei. — Você conhece a Ana? — Conheço, sim. No pronoun at all. So your real toolkit is: me and te everywhere, o / a when you want to sound careful, ele / ela or nothing when you want to sound like everyone else.
If you read European Portuguese
Books and websites from Portugal hook the pronoun onto the back of the verb with a hyphen: vejo-te, conheço-a, liga-me. That's enclisis, and it's the plain-sentence default there. Certain words then pull the pronoun back in front — não, question words, que, se, and adverbs like já and sempre: Não te vejo, Já te disse, Onde a encontras? Notice that those flipped sentences look exactly like Brazilian Portuguese, which is why the two systems agree far more often than the argument suggests. Read enclisis, write proclisis.
