A2 (Elementary)Lesson 11: Tricky Verb Pairs
Portuguese has no single verb for "to borrow". Emprestar means only "to lend", and borrowing is built with pegar, pedir or tomar plus emprestado — a past participle that agrees in gender and number with the thing borrowed. Also covers the everyday spoken request Me empresta...?
emprestar = to LEND, always. The thing leaves you: Emprestei o carro para o meu irmão. (I lent my brother the car.)
There is no verb for "borrow". Build it: pegar / pedir / tomar + the thing + emprestado — Peguei o carro emprestado. (I borrowed the car.)
The prepositions flip. You lend a / para someone; you borrow de someone.
emprestado agrees with the thing borrowed, never with you: o livro emprestado, a bicicleta emprestada, os livros emprestados, as canetas emprestadas (the borrowed book / bicycle / books / pens).
Three shades of borrowing: pegar emprestado (everyday), pedir emprestado (asking for it), tomar emprestado (formal, written).
The real spoken request is Me empresta…? — Me empresta sua caneta? (Can I borrow your pen?)
emprestar algo A/PARA alguém (lend) · pegar/pedir/tomar algo EMPRESTADO DE alguém (borrow)
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Borrowing and lending come up constantly — a pen, a charger, a car, twenty reais until Friday — and this is the one place where English speakers reliably say the exact opposite of what they mean. Reach for emprestar to mean "borrow" and you have just announced that you gave your friend's car away. The agreement ending matters too: emprestado changes with the thing, so getting it wrong marks the sentence as foreign even when the meaning survives. Learn the pair once and a whole everyday transaction stops being a coin toss.
English hands you two tidy verbs and lets you pick: lend (the thing leaves you) and borrow (the thing comes to you). Portuguese gives you one verb plus a phrase.
| English | Portuguese | Which way the thing moves |
|---|---|---|
| to lend | emprestar | away from you |
| to borrow | pegar / pedir / tomar + emprestado | toward you |
Emprestar means lend, and only lend. There is no single verb for "borrow" — Brazilians build it from a verb of taking (pegar, pedir, tomar) plus the word emprestado, which itself means "lent".
So the sentence you need depends on which end of the deal you are standing on:
| Portuguese | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Emprestei a minha bicicleta para a Carla. | I lent Carla my bicycle. |
| O João pegou o meu notebook emprestado. | João borrowed my laptop. |
| Você me empresta o seu guarda-chuva? | Will you lend me your umbrella? |
| Peguei três livros emprestados na biblioteca. | I borrowed three books from the library. |
| Ela pediu o vestido emprestado para a irmã. | She asked her sister to lend her the dress. |
| Meu pai nunca empresta as ferramentas dele. | My dad never lends out his tools. |
| A escola tomou as cadeiras emprestadas da igreja. | The school borrowed the chairs from the church. |
| Não posso sair: o carro está emprestado. | I can't go out — the car is lent out. |
Using emprestar when you mean "borrow". English pulls you into ❌ Eu emprestei o carro dele — but o carro dele is his car, so that says you lent his car out to somebody else. And ❌ Eu emprestei o carro para ele says you lent him the car: the opposite of what you meant. ✅ Eu peguei o carro dele emprestado. (I borrowed his car.)
Forgetting the agreement. ❌ Peguei a bicicleta emprestado. → ✅ Peguei a bicicleta emprestada. (I borrowed the bicycle.) The ending follows the object, always.
Agreeing with the borrower instead. A woman still says ✅ Peguei o livro emprestado. (I borrowed the book.) Writing emprestada there would be describing her, not the book.
The wrong preposition after pegar emprestado. ❌ Peguei o carro emprestado para o meu irmão means you borrowed the car for your brother, to hand it to him. ✅ Peguei o carro emprestado do meu irmão. (I borrowed the car from my brother.)
Dropping emprestado altogether. It is a separate word and can move — Peguei emprestado o livro and Peguei o livro emprestado (both: I borrowed the book) are fine either way — but it cannot vanish. ❌ Peguei o livro do João just means you took João's book, which sounds like you did not ask.
Reaching for tomar emprestado in conversation. It is correct, but it lands formal. In speech, ✅ Peguei emprestado (I borrowed it) is what people actually say; save tomei emprestado for writing.
You will hear emprestar de — don't copy it. In casual speech some Brazilians do say Emprestei um livro do meu amigo for "I borrowed a book from my friend". Recognise it, but it is non-standard and genuinely ambiguous; peguei emprestado is never misunderstood.
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