Ir + infinitive for plans and near future

This is the future you will speak in. Brazilians reach for vou fazer almost every time, keeping the one-word future for writing and formal speech, so a learner who masters this pair can talk about tomorrow, next month and the rest of their life without touching another tense. It is also the cheapest structure in the language: one verb takes all the work and the second one stays in the dictionary form you already know. The only real trap is the one the same verb sets for you — put a preposition after ir and you have gone somewhere, leave it out and you have made a plan.

The same verb doing two jobs, and the preposition tells you which

Ir is the busiest verb in Brazilian Portuguese because it never gave up its old job when it took a new one. Look at what follows it:

That is the whole test. If there is an a, para or em after it, someone is moving; if a verb follows it naked, you are talking about later. And do not slip a preposition in front of that infinitive — ✗ vou a comprar is not Portuguese, however natural it feels.

Sometimes both readings are true at once, and nobody minds: Vou buscar o pão (I'm going to fetch the bread) is a plan and a trip to the bakery.

Plans

• "Vou viajar para o Nordeste em janeiro." (I'm going to travel to the Northeast in January.)

• "A gente vai jantar fora hoje." (We're going out for dinner tonight.)

• "Meus pais vão mudar de casa." (My parents are going to move house.)

• "Você vai estudar para a prova?" (Are you going to study for the test?)

Going somewhere, or doing something later

• "Vou ao dentista amanhã de manhã." (I'm going to the dentist tomorrow morning.)

• "Vou comprar pão na padaria." (I'm going to buy bread at the bakery.)

• "Ela vai para o trabalho de ônibus." (She goes to work by bus.)

• "Ela vai trabalhar em casa amanhã." (She's going to work from home tomorrow.)

Vamos is also "let's"

Vamos + infinitive has a second life as an invitation rather than a prediction: Vamos comer? (Shall we eat?) · Vamos embora. (Let's go.) Your voice and the situation separate them — Vamos comer às oito is a plan, Vamos comer? is a suggestion. The imperative point earlier in A2 covers that side of it.

A gente vai, never a gente vamos

A gente means "we" but takes the same verb form as ele, and that does not change just because a second verb follows: A gente vai chegar às oito. (We're going to arrive at eight.) ✗ A gente vamos chegar is the single most common slip with this structure.

Vou querer: how to order

At a counter or a table, Brazilians place an order in the future rather than the present. Vou querer o prato do dia. (I'll have the dish of the day.) sounds normal and polite where Quero can land a little bare. You will hear the waiter meet you halfway with Vai querer mais alguma coisa?

The pronoun goes in front of the pair

When an object pronoun joins in, Brazilians put it before the whole thing: Vou te ligar mais tarde. (I'll call you later.) It does not sit between the two verbs, and it does not lead the sentence. The object-pronoun point in Lesson 5 has the full picture.

One of the songs that carried Brazil out of its dictatorship is built on this structure. Vai Passar, written by Chico Buarque with Francis Hime and released in 1984, turns the plain future of passar into a promise that the long night of the regime would end, and it became the musical symbol of the Diretas Já campaign and the return to civilian government. On New Year's Eve of that year it was sung in Tancredo Neves' apartment in Rio as the transition was celebrated. Sources: chicobuarque.com.br, Memorial da Democracia

Grammarians have ruled that vou ir is not the repetition it looks like. In the Gramatigalhas column José Maria da Costa argues there is no error in it at all, because the first ir is an auxiliary and the second is the main verb — the same arrangement Portuguese accepts without complaint in há de haver, tinha tido and vinha vindo. What made that possible is a slow shift that Adriana Gibbon traced across 743 recorded utterances: ir has been drifting away from movement and towards being a pure tense marker, with younger speakers leading the change. Sources: Migalhas — Gramatigalhas, Círculo Fluminense de Estudos Filológicos — Adriana Gibbon