Indirect object pronouns and 'flipped' verbs
An indirect object answers 'to whom, for whom'. Eu te dou o livro = I'm giving you the book — te is the one receiving. Portuguese has a set of pronouns for this job, and a small family of verbs (doer, parecer, acontecer) that can't work without them. The trap of the day: gostar is not in that family. It takes de, never a pronoun — gosto de café, and never me gosta café.
The pronouns
me = to me. te = to you (informal). lhe = to him / to her / to you (formal). nos = to us. lhes = to them / to you all. (vos exists on paper, from the vós paradigm Brazil doesn't use — recognize it, don't say it.) Notice how little you have to learn: me, te, nos are exactly the same words you met last lesson as direct objects. Only the third person splits: direct o, a, os, as versus indirect lhe, lhes. And lhe doesn't show gender at all — Eu lhe dou o livro works for him and for her alike.
Placement — same rules as direct objects
Nothing new: in Brazil the pronoun goes in front of the verb. Ela me dá um chá. Eu te digo a verdade. Não te dou o livro hoje. O Pedro nos escreve todo mês. When two verbs stack, it slides between them: Vou te dar o livro amanhã. The one thing that changes with lhe is how often you'll actually use it, which brings us to the everyday alternative: instead of Eu lhe dou o livro, Brazilians overwhelmingly say Eu dou o livro para ele — the preposition para plus a normal pronoun, sitting after the verb where English would put it too.
The flipped verbs — doer, parecer, acontecer
These three work like English 'it seems to me' rather than 'I seem'. The grammatical subject is the thing — the headache, the impression, the event — and the person shows up as the pronoun. Me dói a cabeça = my head hurts (literally 'the head hurts to me'). Me parece bem = it seems fine to me. O que acontece com você? = what's going on with you? doer agrees with the body part, so it's dói for one (a cabeça, a barriga) and doem for more than one (os pés, os olhos). Brazilians often skip the pronoun entirely and use a possessive instead: Minha cabeça dói, Meus pés doem, or with the gerund, Minha cabeça está doendo. And the single most common way to say it doesn't use doer at all: Estou com dor de cabeça — literally 'I'm with a headache'. (The European Dói-me a cabeça is the same grammar with the pronoun hooked on behind.)
Gostar — the trap
It would be so tidy if gostar joined the doer family. It doesn't. Gostar conjugates with the person doing the liking, and it takes de before the thing liked: Eu gosto de chá. Você gosta de café? A Ana gosta dos amigos (de + os = dos). Never me gosta o chá — if you catch yourself reaching for a pronoun, reach for de instead. Spanish speakers fight this one for months, because me gusta has no Portuguese twin. The same goes for people: Eu gosto de você = I like you (and it's warmer than it looks — one step below te amo).
Three useful patterns to drill
One: complaints. Minha cabeça está doendo. Estou com dor de barriga. Meus olhos doem. Two: opinions. Me parece bem = sounds good to me. Me parece uma boa ideia. O que você acha? is how Brazilians actually ask 'what do you think?', with O que te parece? as the more literary cousin. Three: giving and needing. Você me dá um chá? = can I have a tea? (literally 'do you give me a tea?' — the ordinary polite way to ask for something). Eu preciso de tempo. Preciso dormir. Note that precisar takes de before a noun, but nothing before another verb.
Register: te, lhe and para você
lhe is alive in contracts, newspapers and careful speech, and it's fading everywhere else — in normal conversation Brazilians say para ele, para ela, para você, or simply te. So one English sentence has three Brazilian gears: Eu lhe digo a verdade (formal), Eu te digo a verdade (everyday), Eu digo a verdade para você (also everyday, and the clearest). In much of the Northeast lhe does something different again — it replaces te as the familiar 'you': Eu lhe ligo amanhã said to a close friend. Wherever you are, doer and parecer keep their pronoun in front: me dói, me parece.
