In English, the Pronomes Pessoais Retos are referred to as Subject Personal Pronouns. This is because these pronouns take up the place of the grammatical subject in the sentence. In non-technical words, that means the words for I, you, he, she, it, we and they = the doers of the sentence.
What’s 1st person singular?
When you hear people say “1st person singular” or “2nd person plural”, what they are referring to is specific grammatical people. This helps us determine what verb ending we need. This is crucial to understand and be understood in Portuguese “perfectly” in every situation.
Now, does this mean you need to absolutely memorise every single word and rule? Absolutely not, and you’ll get by knowing a little of it.
As I’ve said many times to my students. I’m completely against anxiety in language learning as it inhibits the process and makes for a miserable experience. This is why “perfectly” is in quotation marks. No one expects perfection and Portuguese people love it if you make the attempt rather than just speaking English immediatly. The main thing is to be able to communicate. However, I wouldn’t be much of a teacher if I didn’t at least try to explain what all this is about and how it works.
Pronomes Pessoais Retos in Portuguese
Simply put, they are the words for “I”, “you”, “he”, “she”, “we” and “they”. You would think this is simple, but in fact, it becomes a bit more complex in Portuguese as you will see below.
How to Pronounce them
Null-Subject
In contrast to English, Portuguese does not need always to have an explicit “doer” stated in the sentence. This is because Portuguese is a null-subject language. This “doer” would be expressed by using a personal pronoun like “he”. But this is not necessary all the time in Portuguese because of the high inflection of our verbs. Let’s look at two examples:
🇬🇧English: I have a pen.
🇵🇹Portuguese:
It doesn’t have to be “Eu tenho uma caneta” – tenho is already telling me that it’s “I” who has the pen. This is usually not possible in English grammar to have a complete sentence. We don’t say “have a pen” and know it’s “I”.
🇬🇧English: You have a pen.
🇵🇹Portuguese:
So are these pronouns used at all then?
Yes, of course! We do use them when emphasising or when changing the subject (doer of the action). We just don’t use them in every single sentence where there is a verb. Let’s look at an example of this in conversation.
Consider the following scenario: let’s say you’ve just met João and he says:
“I‘m Portuguese and I live in Coimbra. I have a brother and we go singing karaoke together. He has a son but I have a daughter.”
In English, we’ve used the pronoun “I” four times and the pronouns “we” and “he” once each.
Now let’s look at how this could look in Portuguese.
As you can see, “I” was used only twice. The second “eu” was emphatic. “he” appeared once but “we” wasn’t used at all. “Eu” could even have only been used once depending on if João was introducing himself or answering a direct question.
Now I know that sounds complicated and really strange now, but don’t worry about trying to memorize this. You will pick this up naturally the more you expose yourself to the language. Don’t forget to check out this post here to learn more about this “non-use” of pronouns.
Practice with this Free Quiz
