Asking Questions in Portuguese

Ah! questions, questions, so many questions! Olá pessoal! Welcome back. Asking questions in Portuguese is a topic that gives many students a headache. Hopefully, I won’t with this guide where I’ve broken it up into smaller chunks. Grab a drink, a pen, and a notebook and let’s jump in.

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There is no “do you…?”

There are several ways to ask a question in Portuguese. And we’ll start with the most basic: closed-ended questions. These questions are answered with simple words such as yes/no/mostly/not quite/etc. One key thing to remember is that closed-ended questions in Portuguese are worded simpler than in English. For one, we do NOT say “DO YOU…?” in Portuguese.

For example, in English, we say: “Do you like Portugal?” But in Portuguese, we say: “You like Portugal?”

This sounds simple enough – add a question mark to a statement and change your inflexion:

Tu gostas de Portugal. (You like Portugal.)

Tu gostas de Portugal? (Do you like Portugal?)

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No Word Order Change

Notice that we don’t invert the word order like in English, it stays the same as if it were a statement. It’s only our voices going up at the end and we make it sound like a question. Here is another example:

Vocês vão de carro amanhã. (You (all) are going by car tomorrow.)

Vocês vão de carro amanhã? (Are you (all) going by car tomorrow?)

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There is no “Are you…?” either

Did you notice there was no “Are you going…?” in the last example? We said, “You go…?”. More examples:

Vocês querem ir ao cinema? (You (all) want to go to the cinema?/Do you (all) want to go to the cinema?)

Vocês vão ao cinema? (You go to the cinema?/Are you (all) going to the cinema?)

The same applies to other tenses and to the negative as well. This means there is no “don’t you…?” or “Did you…?” etc either.

Vocês foram ao cinema? (You (all) went to the cinema?/Did you (all) go to the cinema?)

Vocês não foram ao cinema? (You not went to the cinema?/Didn’t you (all) go to the cinema?)

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Where’s the pronoun?

Now THIS is the part where it can get very confusing if you’re not up to speed with your verb conjugations. As I mentioned in the lesson Null-Subject Language, Portuguese doesn’t need the doer explicitly mentioned as we do in English. In other words, the personal pronoun gets dropped and the verb does all the work. This is why we have so many conjugations. So now you have “simple” yes/no questions that don’t use:

1. do you/don’t you/did he/did they, etc;
2. are you/aren’t you / are they/aren’t they, etc;
3. explicit doers;

Let’s have another look:

Gostas de Portugal? (Do you (inf) like Portugal?)

Não foram ao cinema? (You not went to the cinema?/Didn’t you (all) go to the cinema?)

Foram ao cinema? (You (all) went to the cinema?/Did you (all) go to the cinema?)

Querem ir ao cinema? (You (all) want to go to the cinema?/Do you (all) want to go to the cinema?)

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Free Practice Quiz

Okay, so we’re over the first part. Here is a simple quiz to help cement this.

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What’s Next?

Now that you have some insight into asking closed-ended questions, it’s time to move on to answering them and answering questions with question tags. So click below on the “Yes or No Answers & Questions Tags” tile. From there, go to “open-ended questions” , “É Que” and finally “Question words with prepositions“.