Portuguese · Chapter 8 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer

Conjunctions and prepositional phrases

Prescribed by the Edexcel specification.

The short version

Que can never be dropped, unlike English's that

English happily drops that: I think he's coming. Portuguese always states que: acho que ele vem. Leaving it out is not casual speech, it is simply wrong.

Acho que ele vem.

I think (that) he's coming.

Subordinate clauses keep normal word order in Portuguese

Unlike German, Portuguese never sends the verb to the end of a clause after a conjunction. Subject-verb-object stays exactly where it was, which makes this one of the easier structures on the whole GCSE list.

Ele disse que trabalhava muito.

He said that he worked a lot.

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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Practice

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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 15 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.

Lesson 14 of 16 in this chapter

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