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Portuguese grammar wheels

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Grammar Wheels

"I gave my three books to her at the market." — Change any wheels to see how Portuguese encodes each shift.

Common questions about Portuguese

What can I toggle on the Portuguese wheel?
Subject (eu, tu, ele/ela, nós, vocês, eles/elas), tense (past, present, future), aspect (simple, progressive 'estar a / estar -ndo', perfect with ter), mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), polarity, voice, and the tu / você register dial.
How does the wheel handle the subjunctive?
Switching mood to subjunctive triggers 'que' and rewrites the verb stem to the subjunctive form (fala → fale, sabe → saiba, é → seja). The wheel shows the trigger clause and the inflected verb together so the link between them is visible.
What changes when I flip between tu and você?
Both pronouns mean 'you', but tu takes second-person verb endings while você takes third-person endings, so the same verb form is read differently depending on which is set. The wheel labels which person and ending pair you are seeing.
How is the present progressive shown?
European Portuguese builds it with 'estar a' + infinitive ('estou a falar'); Brazilian builds it with 'estar' + gerund ('estou falando'). The wheel exposes both options and labels the variety so the contrast is visible.
Does the wheel cover personal infinitives?
Yes. Where context calls for a personal infinitive — for example 'para nós falarmos' — toggling person on a non-finite clause inflects the infinitive itself, which the wheel rebuilds and glosses.

Sources for Portuguese

The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.

  1. Raposo, Eduardo Buzaglo Paiva et al. (2013). Gramática do Português. Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.
  2. Cunha, Celso & Cintra, Lindley (2017). Nova Gramática do Português Contemporâneo, 7th ed. Lisbon: Lexikon.
  3. Mateus, Maria Helena Mira et al. (2003). Gramática da Língua Portuguesa, 6th ed. Lisbon: Caminho.
  4. Perini, Mário A. (2002). Modern Portuguese: A Reference Grammar. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  5. Thomas, Earl W. (1969). The Syntax of Spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

See all data sources and dataset-level citations for the broader bibliography.

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