Pretérito perfeito — regular verbs
The pretérito perfeito is the workhorse past tense: one event, finished, done. 'I spoke', 'she ate', 'we bought food yesterday'. Today you get the regular endings for all three families — falar → falei, comer → comi, partir → parti — and the Brazilian shape of the table, which is short: eu, você/ele/ela, nós, vocês/eles/elas. Four forms, no tu row to memorize.
What the pretérito perfeito means
It marks an action that is over, usually anchored to a past moment: ontem (yesterday), semana passada (last week), no ano passado (last year), dois dias atrás (two days ago). Falei com a Ana ontem = I spoke with Ana yesterday. It also does a job English hands to the present perfect: Você já comeu? = Have you eaten yet? Nunca fui ao Rio = I've never been to Rio. Portuguese has a compound past too (tenho falado), but it means something else — repeated action up to now — so don't reach for it when you want plain 'I spoke'. The other past tense, the imperfeito, arrives in lesson 18; for now: finished = perfeito.
-ar verbs — falar
Drop -ar and add the endings: eu falei, você falou / ele falou / ela falou, nós falamos, vocês falaram / eles falaram / elas falaram. The chant is -ei, -ou, -amos, -aram. Every regular -ar verb behaves: trabalhei, trabalhou, trabalhamos, trabalharam; comprei, comprou, compramos, compraram. Watch the first two — only the você/ele form gets -ou; eu ends in -ei. Books from Portugal add a tu row (falaste); in Brazil that turns up in the South and parts of the Northeast, and even there people mostly say você falou. Recognize it, don't drill it.
-er verbs — comer
Drop -er and add: eu comi, você comeu, nós comemos, eles comeram. Same for beber → bebi, bebeu, bebemos, beberam, and for escrever → escrevi, escreveu, escrevemos, escreveram. The nós form comemos is identical to the present tense — a time word usually settles which one you mean. ler shrinks a little: li, leu, lemos, leram.
-ir verbs — partir
Drop -ir and add: eu parti, você partiu, nós partimos, eles partiram. abrir → abri, abriu, abrimos, abriram. dormir is regular here, even though its present tense isn't: dormi, dormiu, dormimos, dormiram. The giveaway ending is -iu in the third person singular: partiu, abriu, dormiu.
Nós falamos — the accent we don't write
Portugal writes an accent on the nós past of -ar verbs (falámos) so it can't be confused with the present. Brazil doesn't: nós falamos is both 'we speak' and 'we spoke', and the sentence around it decides. Nós falamos português em casa = we speak Portuguese at home. Nós falamos português na aula ontem = we spoke Portuguese in class yesterday. The time word does the work. Speech has an escape hatch anyway: a gente takes the third person, so a gente falou is unmistakably past — one reason Brazilians reach for it so often. This only affects -ar verbs; comemos and partimos look the same on both sides of the Atlantic.
Time markers that pull this tense
ontem = yesterday. anteontem = the day before yesterday. semana passada = last week (na semana passada in careful writing, but Brazilians drop the na constantly). mês passado, ano passado. For 'ago' there are two options: the written há — há dois dias — and the one you'll actually hear, atrás, which goes after the time: dois dias atrás, um mês atrás. Pin any of these to a perfeito verb and you have a complete past sentence: Trabalhei muito ontem. Compramos uma casa ano passado.
