Welcome to the Present Tense in Portuguese – Part 3! As we saw in the first lesson here, the verbs in Portuguese can be cumbersome to learn, for those who don’t have this in their native language – like in English for instance. The reason for this part 3 is that there are a few “er” and “ir” verbs whose conjugation suffers a small change in the first person. After that, they go back to following the normal regular verb pattern. The change is very small and consists of one letter change.
“e” to “i”
“o” to “u”
“g” to “j”
“gu” to “g”
“c” to “ç”
And remember, to keep all this manageable to learn as you go:
Firstly, learn the infinitives and the conjugations for the grammatical persons “I” and “he/she” for most used conversational verbs. Doing this will cut your work in half. There is a hidden bonus here which is that the “he/she” conjugation is the same for the “formal you” and is also used for objects and/or for “it”. When you feel confident with these then add the remaining conjugations one at a time later.
And that was the Present Tense in Portuguese – Part 3. Part 1 is about regular verbs and lesson 2 is about irregular verbs (part 2).