Portuguese · Chapter 4 · Lesson 22 · Themed review
Ontem, hoje, amanhã
Time words sorted by scale, from the second to the year, with the small adverbs that place an event before, after or during another.
Practise this lesson
20-word session
A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.
Worth knowing
Time words in Brazilian Portuguese, from a second to a year
Time words are the easiest vocabulary to learn and the easiest to misuse, because two of the commonest ones in Portuguese mean different things depending on the little word in front of them.
The three days
is yesterday, is today and is tomorrow. is now. These four carry most of the tense work in casual speech: is perfectly good Portuguese for I will go tomorrow, with no future tense in sight.
The trap: manhã and amanhã, tarde and tarde
is morning. is tomorrow. They are the same word historically, and the article keeps them apart: is in the morning, is tomorrow morning.
is afternoon as a noun, à or , and late as an adverb: é is it is late. is early. is night, and covers both good evening and good night.
By scale
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| second |
| minute |
| hour |
| day |
| week |
| month |
| year |
| moment |
is also the ordinal second, so o is the second day, not a day of seconds. doubles as the time on the clock: ? is what time is it, in the plural.
is masculine despite its ending, so it is o and . It is one of the few exceptions worth knowing by name.
Before, after, soon
is before and is after or afterwards. Both take before a noun: do , . is during and takes no .
is soon or right away, and in Brazil até is see you soon. It also means therefore in a more formal register, which is how Descartes gets translated: , .
These are the words that let a learner place one event against another, which is what turns a list of sentences into a story.