Is Portuguese grammar hard? Seven parts, ranked

Portuguese grammar is not hard for an English speaker, but it is not evenly easy either. Most of it is ordinary Romance grammar that you meet early and stop noticing: two genders, verbs that change their endings, contractions such as no ("in the") and pela ("for the"). Three things take real time: where the object pronoun goes, which differs between Brazil and Portugal; the future subjunctive, which English does not have; and the personal infinitive, which almost no other language has. Below, seven parts of the grammar are ranked from easiest to hardest, with what makes each one easy or hard.

Updated 10 October 2026 · 13 min read

The broader question, including why the sounds are harder than the grammar, is answered in is Portuguese hard to learn. This post looks only at the grammar.

The seven parts at a glance

Contractions: no, da, pelo

In Portuguese a preposition and the article that follows it usually join into one word. With de ("of, from"), em ("in, on"), por ("by, through, for") and a ("to"), joining is required in every register:

So "thank you for the help" is obrigado pela ajuda, and "I live in Brazil" is moro no Brasil, because Brazil takes an article, o Brasil. Portugal does not take one, so it is moro em Portugal and sou de Portugal. Most country names take the article, so the contraction comes with them. The same joining happens with demonstratives (deste, "of this"; naquele, "in that") and with pronouns (dele, "his", literally "of him").

These are some of the commonest words in the language. In Brazilian film and television dialogue, four of the thirty commonest word forms are contractions: do is 20th, da 25th, no 26th and na 29th. Speech adds a contraction that writing avoids: pra, from para ("for, to"), is word number 101.

Why it is easy: one table, and you see it in almost every sentence. The trap, mostly for Spanish speakers: no means "in the", not "no", and pelo means "for the", not "hair". Portuguese vs Spanish lists the other common spellings that mean something different in the two languages.

Gender: two, and mostly predictable

Every noun is masculine or feminine, and articles and adjectives agree with it. Usually the ending tells you which: -o is masculine (carro, car), -a is feminine (casa, house), and nouns in -ção are feminine. There are exceptions, as in every Romance language: dia (day) and problema (problem) are masculine, and mão (hand) is feminine. Even the number two agrees: dois livros (two books) but duas casas (two houses).

For an English speaker this is new but limited. For someone who already speaks Spanish, the trap is a small set of everyday nouns whose gender differs between the two languages:

How many verb forms you actually need

On paper, the verb system is the heaviest part of the grammar. There are three conjugation classes (-ar, -er, -ir), each with its own set of about fifty endings, and grammarians count eleven one-word tense and mood paradigms. Several of the commonest verbs are irregular, and many of the irregular ones change their vowel between "I" and "he" in the past: fiz (I did) and fez (he did), pude (I could) and pôde (he could), tive (I had) and teve (he had).

Spoken Brazilian Portuguese needs much less of that than the tables suggest:

• Two of the six person forms are rarely heard. Você ("you") takes the same verb form as "he" and "she", and so does a gente, the everyday word for "we". The tu form survives in only a few parts of Brazil, and plural vós has dropped out of nearly all speech. So the everyday present of falar (to speak) has four forms: falo, fala, falamos, falam.
• The one-word future and conditional are mostly gone from speech. People say vou falar ("I'm going to speak") rather than falarei. The 100 most common Portuguese verbs counts how much more often.
• The one-word pluperfect is for reading only. Ele falara ("he had spoken") still appears in print in Brazil, and even there it is losing ground to ele tinha falado.

So to speak, you need far fewer forms than a full table lists. To read, you need to recognise more of them.

Ser, estar and ficar

As in Spanish, "to be" is two verbs. Ser is for what something is (ele é triste, "he is a gloomy person"); estar is for its state at the moment (ele está triste, "he is feeling sad"). The general rule is the same as in Spanish, and ser vs estar sets it out with Spanish examples. Portuguese differs in a few places:

• Some sentences that take estar in Spanish take ser. É proibido fumar ("smoking is forbidden") and a cadeira é feita de madeira ("the chair is made of wood"), where Spanish uses estar.
• Where a place is, Portuguese often says with ficar. "Where is the airport?" is usually onde fica o aeroporto? Ser is also possible for a fixed place, and estar suggests somewhere temporary or close at hand.
• Ficar also means "to stay" and "to become". Fiquei dentro de casa todo o dia ("I stayed inside all day"); a minha avó está ficando surda ("my grandmother is going deaf").

The present perfect is not "I have done"

This one catches English speakers. Portuguese has a form that looks like the English present perfect, tenho feito ("I have done"), but it means something done repeatedly up to now, closer to "I have been doing". Tenho pensado em pedi-la em casamento means "I have been thinking about asking her to marry me", not that the thought came once.

For a single finished event, where English says "I have…", Portuguese uses the plain past:

• Não, obrigado. Já jantei. "No, thanks. I've already had dinner."
• Fui à Espanha duas vezes. "I've been to Spain twice."

Where the pronoun goes

Object pronouns (me, te, o, a, lhe, nos) always sit next to the verb, but which side they go on depends on the country.

In Brazil, they go before the verb almost everywhere, even at the start of a sentence: eu te amo ("I love you"), me diz ("tell me"), você tinha me dito ("you had told me"). In casual speech, the third-person object is often replaced by the subject pronoun: vi eles na praia ontem rather than vi-os na praia ontem ("I saw them on the beach yesterday"). Only a few fixed politeness phrases keep the written form in speech: prazer em conhecê-lo ("pleased to meet you"), posso ajudá-lo? ("can I help you?").

In Portugal, the pronoun normally goes after the verb, joined to it by a hyphen: eu amo-te, diz-me. A sentence may never begin with the pronoun, so me diz is wrong there. Certain words before the verb pull the pronoun in front of it:

Then there are the pronoun's changing forms, which a reader in either country meets in writing: after a verb ending in -r, -s or -z, the consonant drops and o becomes -lo (fazer + o = fazê-lo, "to do it"; faz + o = fá-lo, "does it"), and after a nasal ending it becomes -no (tem + a = tem-na, "has it"). In formal writing the pronoun can even go inside a future verb: cantar-te-ei uma balada, "I will sing you a ballad". This is called mesoclisis. It never occurs in spoken Brazilian Portuguese and is becoming rare in Portugal.

How hard it is depends on the variety. For Brazilian Portuguese, the speaking rule is short: put the pronoun before the verb. For European Portuguese, it is the grammar point that takes longest to get right. Brazilian vs European Portuguese shows how often each pattern is heard in each country.

The future subjunctive: "if" and "when" about the future

English says "if I am elected" and "when you are older" in the present tense. Portuguese uses a special tense for these, the future subjunctive, and still uses it every day in speech and writing:

• Se eu for eleito presidente, mudarei a lei. "If I am elected president, I will change the law."
• Quando fores mais velho, compreenderás. "When you are older, you'll understand." (European Portuguese, with tu)
• O prêmio vai para a primeira pessoa que disser a resposta correta. "The prize goes to the first person who says the right answer."

It appears after se ("if") and quando ("when") when they refer to the future, and in a clause describing someone or something that does not exist yet ("the first person who says…"). Spanish has almost lost the tense, so Spanish speakers, as well as English speakers, tend to put a present tense here. How the forms are built from the past tense, and how often the common ones are said, is in the 100 most common Portuguese verbs.

Why it is hard: not the forms, which follow one rule, but remembering to use them, because nothing in English tells you to.

The personal infinitive: an infinitive with a subject

This is the part of Portuguese grammar that has the least in common with other languages. Among the major Romance languages only Portuguese has it; Galician shares it. An infinitive normally has no person ("to go"), but Portuguese can add a person ending to it:

It lets you give an infinitive its own subject where English would need "for us to" or "that we":

• É melhor voltarmos. "It's better that we go back."
• A recepcionista pediu para esperarmos. "The receptionist asked us to wait."
• Para chegarmos cedo, temos que nos apressar. "For us to arrive early, we need to hurry."

What is easy about it: it is never irregular. Every verb adds the same endings to its infinitive, and the "I" and "he/she" forms look exactly like the plain infinitive.

What is hard: for regular verbs, it is identical to the future subjunctive (falarmos is both), but for irregular verbs the two differ. Quando formos ("when we go") is the future subjunctive; é melhor irmos ("it's better that we go") is the personal infinitive. And depending on the sentence, it may be required, optional or not allowed, which only comes with practice.

It is not just a written form. Because irregular verbs give their personal infinitive a different shape from the future subjunctive, some of its forms can be counted separately in Brazilian dialogue, and each of these can only be a personal infinitive:

These are only the "we" forms, and the counts cover 426 million words of subtitles. Irmos is said more often than formos, the future subjunctive "if/when we go or are", which ranks 4,119th.

So is Portuguese grammar hard?

• Easy: contractions and gender, which you learn in the first weeks.
• Easier than the tables suggest: verbs, because spoken Brazilian Portuguese uses only part of what the tables list.
• Medium: ser, estar and ficar, and the present perfect, which looks like English and does not mean the same thing.
• Hard: pronoun placement in European Portuguese, the future subjunctive, and the personal infinitive. None of them is difficult to form. The difficulty is knowing when to use them, and that comes from seeing them in a great deal of real Portuguese, not from a table.

The best way through that last group is to meet the forms in sentences, in a sensible order. Verbavia (our own course) teaches Brazilian Portuguese free on the web, in any browser and on a phone: hand-written lessons with the grammar explained in English, words in frequency order, and reading, listening and writing sections. The Portuguese course starts with the most common Portuguese words, and the two-minute Portuguese vocabulary test shows how many of them you already know. How long the whole language takes is in how long does it take to learn Portuguese.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Portuguese grammar: the obligatory contractions of de, em, por and a with the article, and the grave accent of à; gender by ending (-ção feminine) and árvore against Spanish árbol; the 11 conjugational paradigms and some 50 suffixes per conjugation class; ser and estar (ele é triste, ele está triste); the personal infinitive (é melhor voltarmos), shared with Galician, and that it may be "forbidden, required, or optional"; the personal infinitive against the future subjunctive (quando formos, é melhor irmos); ir + infinitive replacing the synthetic future in speech; the synthetic pluperfect (falara) in Brazil "nearly exclusively in the printed language".
• Wikipedia: Personal pronouns in Portuguese: proclisis and enclisis in Brazil (eu te amo, me diz, você tinha me dito) and Portugal (eu amo-te, diz-me); sentences beginning with a clitic as unacceptable in European Portuguese; the five kinds of word that attract the pronoun, with the examples in the table; the -lo and -no forms (fá-lo, tem-na, fazê-lo); mesoclisis (cantar-te-ei), never in spoken Brazilian Portuguese and becoming rare in Portugal; vi eles na praia ontem, and prazer em conhecê-lo and posso ajudá-lo? as fixed phrases; a gente with a third-person singular verb; vós replaced by vocês in nearly all dialects.
• Wikipedia: Comparison of Portuguese and Spanish: você with the third-person verb; é proibido fumar, a cadeira é feita de madeira, onde fica o aeroporto? and ficar as "stay" and "become"; the iterative present perfect (tenho pensado em pedi-la em casamento) and the preterite where English uses the present perfect (já jantei, fui à Espanha duas vezes); the personal infinitive, "uniquely among the major Romance languages", never irregular (pediu para esperarmos, para chegarmos cedo); the future subjunctive, "virtually obsolete in Spanish", with the three examples above; fiz/fez, pude/pôde, tive/teve; dois/duas; the article with country names (o Brasil, but Portugal).
• Wiktionary: the conjugation tables of falar and ir (personal infinitive and future subjunctive), and the genders of leite, leche, sangue, sangre, viagem, viaje, dor and dolor. The other genders in the table (nariz, mensagem, dia, problema, mão) are as marked in our Portuguese and Spanish course word lists.
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018 (pt_br), content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The ranks of do, da, no, na and of the personal infinitive forms are read from the pt_br full list.