Portuguese · Chapter 6 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
The preterite: finished actions
The regular endings are tidy; the everyday verbs fui, tive, fiz and disse are what catch learners.
The short version
Have you eaten? uses the simple past
Brazilian Portuguese says most of what English puts in the present perfect with the preterite, usually with já or nunca in front. Have you eaten? is você já comeu?, and I have never been is eu nunca fui. Tenho comido exists, but it means I have been eating, regularly, up to now.
Você já comeu?
Fui means both I went and I was
Ser and ir share exactly the same forms in the preterite: fui, foi, fomos, foram. It sounds like a recipe for confusion and almost never is. A place after ao or para means going; a description means being. Eu fui ao cinema is a trip, and foi um dia difícil is a verdict.
Foi um dia difícil.
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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