Portuguese · Chapter 10 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
The subjunctive: doubt, wish and maybe
Talvez, espero que and se eu fosse all reach for it, and in Portuguese the mood still does a full day's work.
The short version
Quando eu chegar is not an infinitive
After quando or se about the future, Portuguese uses the future subjunctive, a tense Spanish has all but dropped. For regular verbs it looks exactly like the infinitive, so learners miss it. Irregulars give it away: se você puder, quando eu for, se você tiver tempo. Never use the future tense after quando.
Quando eu chegar, eu te ligo.
Acho que takes the indicative, not the subjunctive
Acho que states your opinion, so the verb after it stays in the ordinary indicative: acho que ele vem. Negate it and the doubt switches the subjunctive on: não acho que ele venha. The test is simple: if the speaker is asserting something as true, no subjunctive.
Não acho que ele venha.
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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