Learning verbs in Portuguese

Portuguese Questions Verbs
1

Oh my giddy aunt! i cant make any sense of the verbs modue. does anyone have any tips or hints advice or other that will make learning the verbs any easier?

thanks

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2

Hi @kelly.

Don’t panic! Verbs can be tricky at the best of times. :grinning:

As well as the units/modules there are Learning Notes that cover grammatical points and these are great for explaining why things work the way that they do.

There are 3 main groups of verbs in Portuguese arranged by their endings:

  • Verbs ending in -ar
  • Verbs ending in -er
  • Verbs ending in -ir
  • Plus there are some irregular verbs that behave unexpectedly, but you can worry about those later! :wink:

A good place to start is the present tense of verbs ending in -ar, and there’s a great Learning Note here:

Keep Calm and Carry On Conjugating!
You’ll get there in the end :grinning:

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3

Hi @kelly ! Don’t worry, you’re not alone. There are so many different verb endings in Portuguese, so it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

Let us know what sort of trouble you were having with the verbs and maybe we can help. Was it with one of the Units or with the Verbs page? Or just in general?

Here’s a overview of how to use the Verbs page:

You can click here to go to the Verbs section. You’ll see a list of verbs and you can click “Load More” at the bottom to see more. The more common verbs are shown at the beginning of the list, so you could choose to study those first (the only downside is that most of those are irregular :see_no_evil: )!

Each verb has a bubble for each verb tense (past, present, future, etc.). So for example, you could look at the first verb, “Ser”. Click on the “Presente” bubble and it will bring you to a page that shows you the Present Tense conjugation for “ser”. Read through these to study how to say “I am”, “you are”, “he/she is”, “we are”, and “they are”. You can also click the speakers to hear what each word sounds like.

When you’re ready, click on “Start Quiz” and it will give you questions or fill-in-the-blanks to help you practice using the words you just learned.

The Learning Note above is a great place to start too (thanks @Jeremy!), because a lot of verbs follow certain patterns, so it’s easier to learn those as a group. That link will show you the regular present tense verb endings for verbs that end in -AR. After you have those down, you could try working through the Unit for that topic: Regular Present Tense -AR Verbs. When you feel like you know those well, you could move on to other types of verbs, such as Regular Present Tense -ER Verbs and Regular Present Tense -IR Verbs.

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