O presente do subjuntivo
Portuguese has a third mood standing next to the indicativo and the imperativo: the subjuntivo. The indicativo reports what is; the subjuntivo handles what somebody wants, doubts, hopes for, or hasn't seen happen yet. Espero que você fale comigo amanhã = I hope you'll talk to me tomorrow. The trigger sits in front — usually a verb plus que — and the verb after it changes shape. Here's the good news: you already produce these forms. The você commands from lesson 23 — fale, coma, faça, seja, vá — are the present subjunctive wearing a different hat. This lesson builds the whole set; lesson 27 wires up the triggers.
How to build it — the 'eu form swap'
Take the eu form of the present indicative, drop the -o, and add the new endings. falar → falo → fal- → fale. comer → como → com- → coma. partir → parto → part- → parta. The payoff is enormous: every irregular eu form you've already learned comes along for the ride, so there is nothing extra to memorize. fazer → faço → faça. dizer → digo → diga. ter → tenho → tenha. vir → venho → venha. pôr → ponho → ponha. sair → saio → saia. ouvir → ouço → ouça. dormir → durmo → durma. trazer → trago → traga. ver → vejo → veja. If a verb bends in the eu form, it bends here in exactly the same way — one irregularity, learned once, paid off twice.
Endings — flipped from the indicative
The families trade vowels. The -ar family takes e-endings; the -er and -ir families take a-endings. Written out for the four people Brazil actually uses: falar → eu fale, você fale / ele fale / ela fale, nós falemos, vocês falem / eles falem. comer → coma, coma, comamos, comam. partir → parta, parta, partamos, partam. Notice how they mirror the indicative you already know: ele fala becomes que ele fale, ele come becomes que ele coma. And because a gente is the everyday 'we', you'll reach for the singular far more often than for falemos: Espero que a gente chegue cedo. (Grammar books also list a second-person set — fales, comas — that belongs to the tu paradigm still heard in Rio Grande do Sul and parts of the Northeast. Read it, don't drill it: with você the form is always fale.)
The six rebels — verbs that don't follow the eu-form rule
Six high-frequency verbs build the subjunctive from their own stem, and you simply learn them. ser → seja, seja, sejamos, sejam. estar → esteja, esteja, estejamos, estejam. ir → vá, vá, vamos, vão. dar → dê, dê, demos, deem. saber → saiba, saiba, saibamos, saibam. querer → queira, queira, queiramos, queiram. Two footnotes. The nós form of ir is vamos, identical to the indicative, so Vamos! and É bom que a gente vá carry the load in speech instead. And dê wears a circumflex to keep it apart from the preposition de; the plural is spelled deem in Brazil today — the older spelling dêem, with a circumflex, was retired in the 1990 reform. These six show up constantly: Espero que você esteja bem. Quero que ele saiba. Talvez ela queira vir.
haver, poder, fazer — regular by the eu-rule, but worth a look
Three more that behave, but that you'll use hourly. poder → posso → possa, possa, possamos, possam: Espero que você possa vir. fazer → faço → faça, faça, façamos, façam — and keep the cedilla, because faça without it would be faca, a knife. haver is the odd one: it lives almost entirely in the impersonal, matching the há you learned back in lesson 1. Espero que não haja fila. Tomara que haja lugar no ônibus. And Haja paciência! is a whole Brazilian mood in two words — roughly 'give me strength'. The plural hajam exists but you'll almost never need it: impersonal haja stays singular no matter how many things there are.
Spelling tweaks — keeping the consonant honest
When the vowel after the final consonant flips, the spelling adjusts so the sound doesn't. ficar → fico → fique, fiquem (the qu keeps the hard k). chegar → chego → chegue, cheguem (the gu keeps the hard g). jogar → jogue. pagar → pague. Going the other way, começar → começo → comece: the cedilla disappears, because c before e is already soft. almoçar → almoce. conhecer → conheço → conheça — here the cedilla appears for the same reason in reverse. dirigir → dirijo → dirija, with j doing the job that g was doing. None of this is new pronunciation; it's the alphabet keeping its promises.
Brazilian register: same forms, looser triggers
The forms are identical everywhere Portuguese is spoken — fale, coma, seja, vá are written and said the same way in Recife and in Lisbon. What differs is the label and the appetite. Brazil calls the mood the subjuntivo; in Portugal you'll see it called conjuntivo, which is why a grammar book bought abroad has a different table of contents. And Brazilian speech is relaxed about where the mood is required: after acho que the indicative wins outright (Acho que ele vem, not the textbook alternative), and after talvez you will sometimes hear talvez ele vem — non-standard but common. Two places where Brazilians never drop it: after tomara que, the everyday hope-phrase (Tomara que dê tudo certo!), and inside fixed expressions like Se Deus quiser, Seja o que Deus quiser and Que seja!. One more Brazilian habit to carry in: the subjunctive happily takes estar plus a gerund — Espero que ele esteja dormindo, Talvez ela esteja trabalhando.
