Portuguese · Chapter 9 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer

The personal infinitive

Portuguese gives its infinitive person endings, which sounds impossible until it simply says who is acting.

The short version

The personal infinitive has no irregular verbs

Portuguese lets an infinitive take person endings: -mos for nós, -em for vocês and eles, nothing for the rest. Because it is built on the infinitive itself, every verb is regular, even ser and ir: sermos, irmos, serem, irem.

Antes de sairmos, vamos comer.

Before we leave, let's eat.

It is para eu fazer, not para mim fazer

When a pronoun is the one doing the infinitive's action, it is a subject, so it takes the subject form eu. Para mim fazer is everywhere in casual Brazilian speech, but it is widely corrected. With no verb after it, mim is right: é para mim.

Isso é para eu fazer.

This is for me to do.

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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Lesson 8 of 21 in this chapter

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