Portuguese · Chapter 8 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
Preterite or imperfect?
One finishes the story, the other paints the room. Portuguese makes you decide before the sentence ends.
The short version
Long actions can still take the preterite
The imperfect is not the tense for long actions. What decides it is whether the action is framed as finished. Ten years in Paris, reported as a closed block, is perfeito; living in Paris as the backdrop to something else is imperfeito.
Morei dez anos em Paris.
Sabia means I knew, soube means I found out
A few verbs change meaning with the tense. The imperfeito gives the state, the perfeito the moment it began: conhecia is I knew someone, conheci is I met them. Get the tense wrong and you have made a different statement, not a grammar slip.
Eu não sabia. Eu soube ontem.
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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