Portuguese Verb Groups: Three Endings, Very Few Surprises
Portuguese verbs are one of the places where the language is straightforwardly generous. Three patterns, learned once, and most of the vocabulary you meet becomes conjugatable without further thought.
The three families
Every Portuguese infinitive ends one of three ways:
| family | example | notes |
|---|---|---|
| -ar | | much the largest, and the one new verbs join |
| -er | | the middle group |
| - | partir | the smallest |
Take , drop the -ar, and add the endings. This is the Brazilian present:
| person | form |
|---|---|
| |
| |
| |
| falam |
Four forms. That is the whole present tense of a regular -ar verb in the Portuguese a Brazilian actually speaks, and it covers the large majority of verbs in the language. The -er and -ir families swap the vowels and behave the same way.
Notice what the Brazilian standard buys you here. Because has taken over the everyday second person and takes the same form as ele, one ending covers three pronouns. Most textbooks still print a six-row table with tu and vos in it. Those forms are real, and you will meet tu in Portugal and in parts of Brazil, but they are not what a beginner aiming at Sao Paulo needs on day one.
The irregulars are the ones you need first
, , , , , , , , , .
That is not a list of obscure verbs. It is more or less a list of the first verbs you will ever want to use, and they are irregular for exactly that reason. Frequency protects irregularity: a verb used a hundred times a day gets learned as a whole shape by every child, so it never gets tidied into the regular pattern the way a rarer verb does. The same thing happened in English, where go / went survived and google / googled was regular from birth.
The cheering consequence is that you do not really drill these. You meet them every few seconds of Portuguese you hear, and they stick by exposure long before a table would have finished teaching them.
Spelling changes that are not irregularities
Two verbs in the course look irregular and are not:
writes qu before an e, to keep the c hard.writes a c-cedilla before an a or an o, for the opposite reason.
In both cases the sound follows the regular pattern perfectly and the spelling shifts to protect it. Portuguese spelling is largely a faithful servant of pronunciation, and these are cases of it doing its job. File them as regular verbs with a spelling rule, not as exceptions to learn.
Where to start
- The -ar endings, because the family is the biggest and the pattern generalises to the other two.
and, which have a guide of their own, because the split between them is a decision you make in every sentence.,,next: between them they build a startling amount of everyday Portuguese, including the near future, which Brazilians usually express withplus an infinitive rather than with a future tense at all.
That last point is worth taking seriously. A learner who knows and a handful of infinitives can talk about the future straight away, without touching a future tense. Portuguese lets you postpone a great deal if you spend your early effort in the right place.