Portuguese · Chapter 22 · Lesson 7 · Grammar primer
Adjectives
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.
The short version
The adjective agrees even after ser
A Portuguese adjective copies its noun's gender and number wherever it sits, including after ser and estar, where learners forget it most. The gender comes from the noun, not the speaker: a woman describing her car says o carro é novo, because carro is masculine.
A casa é bonita.
Old friend or elderly friend? Check the order
Most adjectives go after the noun. A few change meaning when they move in front: after, they state a fact; before, they say how the speaker sees it. Um amigo velho is an elderly friend, um velho amigo is one you have known for years.
Ele é um velho amigo.
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 18 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 7 of 9 in this chapter