Portuguese · Chapter 1 · Lesson 12 · Grammar primer
Ser and estar: what something is against what it is doing
Portuguese splits to be in two. Permanent against temporary gets you most of the way and then quietly misleads you.
The short version
Permanent against temporary will let you down
It is a useful first approximation and it leaks in both directions: being dead takes estar, and a price that changes weekly takes ser. The better question is whether you are naming what something IS, which is ser, or describing the condition it is IN, which is estar.
A casa e boa.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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