Gerund – When used in Portugal

In this video, we will tackle a common misconception about the Gerund and its use in Portugal and Brazil.

This is a little bit of a different style video. We’re trying to show you a bit of Portugal as we go along. We hope you like it.

Other Videos:
Top 20 Idiomatic Expressions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcyagm9THr8
Imperfect VS Perfect Past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAHIEGEvaQQ

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17 Comments

  1. Eu não estive no seu canal antes. Mas a partir de agora não vou perder uma única aula lá. Feliz Páscoa Carla.

  2. The person in the video pronounces the letter r in the words torradinha and the word porreiro normally like Spanish and not like french.May I know where in Portugal they pronounce the r like this?

  3. Dear Miss. Carla
    Boa tarde. I have been visiting various sites to learn European Portuguese for the last one month and finally found your site 2 days ago. Your course curriculum, material sorting and podcasts are really outstanding. Big Thanks.

    1. Olá, Jahan 👋🏽 muito obrigada! Your positive feedback means a lot to us 🤗 we hope you continue to benefit from it all! Bons estudos 📚

  4. I am watching a lot of your videos. Most are excellent, however, I found this one lacked a bit in quality of translations, at least in how they might be useful to learners. One example: “melhor irmos já abastecer.” While the English would say, exactly, “best to fill up now”, I don’t believe foreign phrase book translations provide the best learning experience. The colloquial translation is missing opportunities for subliminally learning structure. Maybe a better and more correct English translation would be “best we go now to fill up.” This is the first time that one of your videos was really difficult to follow and it was because of the numerous instances of what I just described, especially in the cases where the gerund in PT did not appear as the gerund in English. Most confusing.
    I hope you find the feedback useful and best wishes to you and yours.

    1. I appreciate you taking the time to write this comment 🙂
      In every video of ours, we never aim for a literal translation into English. Perhaps, it would be beneficial for non native English speakers, but I don’t see how that could be helpful to the native ones, even if they believe it would.

      In my personal learning experience as well as in my experience teaching, those who try to understand the exact translation of a language are often significantly behind in their progress when it comes to expressing themselves in the target language.

      The gerund in Portuguese doesn’t translate into the gerund in English in most of the cases, as you pointed out, and that’s probably what threw you. This is why one’s efforts would be better directed at understanding the concept of the gerund in the examples given rather than relying on the translations. The latter are there to give you an idea of what’s being said and at the same time they highlight how unreliable literally translations can be.

      Thanks again for your honest comment and I hope this aspect of the Portuguese grammar becomes clearer to you eventually.

  5. No Alentejo usa-se nas mesmas situações que no Brasil. Acredito que, se o alentejano da Carrasqueira não estivesse a falar com uma professora lisboeta, com certeza que falaria com o gerúndio sempre.

  6. Os portugueses dizem ‘a gente’ = ‘nós’ também? E é comum? Eu achava que isso só foi uma coisa brasileira

    1. Sim, os portugueses também dizem “a gente” numa situação mais informal, e é muito comum, sim 😊

  7. Hi Carla! Please make more videos as your channel is great and I really want to improve my Portuguese. Muito obrigada. I learnt that we say ‘obrigada’ if i’m a female, obrigado if I’m male. BUT If I talk to a male, I say ‘muito prazer em conhece lo’ and if I talk to a female I say, muito prazer em conhece LA. e correct, sim?

    1. Olá 😊 you got it, that’s exactly it! Thank you so much for your comment and my sincere apologies for having missing it until now! I hope you’re keeping up with your Portuguese learning 🤗

  8. Thank you SO MUCH for speaking in your NATURAL rhythm. After having studied portuguese for more than 3 years now, I was able to understand most of what you said. I keep returning to practice understanding more. Great video!

    1. I’m so happy to hear about your progress! 😃 and thank you for continuous support on here 🥰

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