Portuguese · Chapter 18 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
Definite and indefinite articles
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.
The short version
Sou estudante, never sou um estudante
Portuguese drops the indefinite article for a bare profession, nationality, marital status or religion after ser. Add um or uma back the moment an adjective describes the noun.
Sou estudante.
A fruta está cara keeps an article English drops
When Portuguese talks about a whole category, fruit in general, books in general, it still puts o or a in front, exactly where English manages with nothing at all. Under-using the article here is the most common English-speaker slip.
A fruta está cara este ano.
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.
Read the full article · 8 min readPractice
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10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 21 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 14 of 21 in this chapter