Portuguese · Chapter 19 · Lesson 9 · Grammar primer
Ser and estar
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.
The short version
Permanent against temporary will let you down
It is a useful first approximation and it leaks in both directions: being dead takes estar, and a price that changes weekly takes ser. The better question is whether you are naming what something IS, which is ser, or describing the condition it is IN, which is estar.
A casa é boa.
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 · 5 min readPractice
Practise this lesson
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.
Lesson 9 of 16 in this chapter