Portuguese Past Tense: The Preterite for Finished Actions

The Portuguese preterite, the pretérito perfeito, is the past tense for something that happened and is over. You spoke, you ate, you went, it finished. It is the past tense you will reach for first and use most, and it is kinder than its reputation: the regular endings fit on a postcard, and the verbs that break them are a short, familiar list.

Ontem eu falei com ele. - Yesterday I spoke to him.

O que aconteceu? - What happened?

There is one genuine surprise for an English speaker, and it is not in the endings. Portuguese uses this tense for most of what English says with have done. Get that right and the preterite does twice the work you expected.

The regular endings

Each verb family has its own set of endings, and they are added to the stem once the -ar, -er or -ir has gone. These are the Brazilian forms, with você sharing the ele form as it does in every tense:

Three things to notice, because they make the table smaller than it looks:

1. The -er and -ir eu forms end the same way, in a stressed -i: comi, parti.
2. The ele form is the one that identifies the family: -ou, -eu, -iu. If you can hear the vowel before the u, you know which family you are in.
3. The stress is on the ending, all through the tense. That is the whole difference between falo (I speak) and falou (he spoke): the present stresses the stem, FA-lo; the past stresses the ending, fa-LOU. Say the past with the stress in the wrong place and it slides back towards the present.

The nós form is the same as the present

For regular verbs the nós form of the preterite is identical to the present: falamos is both we speak and we spoke. The same goes for comemos and partimos. In practice this almost never causes trouble, because a time word or the context settles it at once:

Nós falamos com ela ontem. - We spoke to her yesterday.

Nós falamos com ela todo dia. - We speak to her every day.

Portugal usually marks the difference in writing on -ar verbs with an accent, falámos, and pronounces the vowel differently too. Brazil writes both the same and lets ontem do the work.

Spelling changes in the eu form

A few regular verbs change their spelling in the eu form only, to keep the consonant sounding the same in front of the -ei ending. These are not irregular verbs; the sound follows the pattern perfectly, and only the letters adjust:

Everywhere else these verbs behave normally: ficou, chegou, começou. Liguei para você ontem (I called you yesterday) and paguei (I paid) follow the same rule, and the full logic is in Portuguese verb conjugation.

When to use it

The preterite reports events that happened and finished, and it is the tense that moves a story forward. The words that usually travel with it are the ones that pin an event to a finished moment:

A sequence of finished events is the preterite all the way through:

Eu cheguei, comi e saí. - I arrived, ate and left.

That sentence is the model for any story you tell about yesterday: one completed action after another.

The have-done trap

This is the part that trips English speakers most, and it is not about endings at all. English has a separate tense for the recent or unspecified past, I have eaten, have you seen it?, I have never been. Brazilian Portuguese mostly does not. It uses the preterite, often with já (already, ever) or nunca (never):

Você já comeu? - Have you eaten?

Já comi. - I have eaten. / I have already eaten.

Você já foi ao Rio? - Have you ever been to Rio?

Eu nunca fui. - I have never been.

There is a form that looks like the English present perfect, ter plus a participle: Eu tenho falado com ela. It exists, and it does not mean I have spoken to her. It means I have been speaking to her, repeatedly, over a period that runs up to now:

Eu tenho falado muito com ela. - I have been talking to her a lot (lately).

So I have spoken to her is Eu já falei com ela, and I have been speaking to her a lot lately is the tenho falado version. An English speaker who translates have eaten as tenho comido has said something like I have been eating (regularly), which is a stranger answer to are you hungry? than intended.

The irregular verbs

As in every language, the verbs that refuse the pattern are the ones used constantly, which means you will meet them every few sentences and learn them faster than any table would. These are the ones to have first:

Two of these deserve a note straight away.

ser and ir are identical in the preterite. fui is both I was and I went, and context always settles it:

Eu fui ao cinema. - I went to the cinema.

Foi um dia difícil. - It was a difficult day.

A place after ao or para means going; a description means being. It sounds alarming for about a week and then stops mattering.

saber in the preterite often means found out. Eu soube ontem is I found out yesterday, not I knew yesterday: knowing something is a state, and a state that begins at a moment is an event. The same shift happens with poder: Eu pude ir is I managed to go.

The complete present-and-past picture of these verbs, with the plural forms and the patterns they share, is on Portuguese irregular verbs.

Preterite or imperfect?

Portuguese has a second past tense, the pretérito imperfeito, for the background rather than the event: what was going on, what things were like, what used to happen. The preterite reports; the imperfect describes.

Ontem eu falei com ele. - I spoke to him yesterday. (one finished event)

Put the two side by side in a single sentence and you have most Portuguese storytelling, and choosing between them has a guide of its own. For now, the rule of thumb is simple: if you could answer and then what happened?, it is the preterite.

Mistakes English speakers make

1. Using tenho plus a participle for have done. Have you eaten? is Você já comeu?, not você tem comido. The ter form means have been doing, repeatedly.
2. Stressing the past like the present. falou is stressed on the ending. Put the stress on the first syllable and it drifts back towards falo, I speak.
3. Forgetting the eu spelling change. It is fiquei and cheguei, not ficei and chegei. The sound is regular; write what you say.
4. Confusing pôde and pode. pôde with a circumflex is he could (past); pode without it is he can (present). The accent is the whole tense.
5. Reading fui as only I went. It is also I was. Fui médico is I was a doctor, and no amount of context will turn it into a journey.

What to do next

Start with the -ar endings, because the -ar family is the largest by far: falei, falou, falamos, falaram. Then learn the irregulars you actually say every day, fui, tive, fiz, disse, vi, as individual words rather than as a table, and practise the have-done switch until Você já comeu? comes out without a detour through English.

Then try telling yesterday aloud in five short preterite sentences: where you went, what you did, what you ate, who you saw, when you got home. Every verb you need for that is in the Portuguese course.