B1 (Intermediate)Lesson 1: Past Habits & Future Plans
You already own both halves — the -ndo form from A2 and estava from the last point. Together they highlight something under way at a reference moment or during a reference period: chovia could be a habit, a description or a background, while estava chovendo focuses on rain in progress. The period can also contain repeated events or a temporary routine; the plain imperfeito remains the usual choice for a general habit.
estava / estávamos / estavam + the -ndo form; only estar changes
The gerund never inflects: estava falando, estávamos falando, estavam falando
It highlights an action in progress at a reference moment or during a reference period
Chovia has several readings; estava chovendo focuses on rain in progress
The frame: continuous for what was under way, perfeito for what interrupted it
enquanto joins two things running at once — either half can be plain imperfeito
For general habits, prefer Eu jogava bola todo dia; estava jogando todo dia can describe a temporary routine
Stable states usually take the plain imperfeito: Ela era alta, Eu tinha medo
estar in the imperfeito + the -ndo form: estava fazendo · only estar changes for the person, the gerund never moves · use it when the plain imperfeito would be ambiguous
Sign up to save your progress, practice exercises and unlock all grammar content.
English speakers arrive here over-equipped, because English uses was -ing far more than Portuguese needs to. Both ele lia and ele estava lendo come out as "he was reading", so the temptation is to reach for the long form every time and sound slightly translated. The useful habit is the reverse one: default to the plain imperfeito, and switch to estava fazendo when you specifically want to pin the action to a moment — usually because something else is about to interrupt it. That is also where the form pays for itself, since "what were you doing when…" is one of the most common questions in any language, and the answer is where most stories start.
Put estar in the imperfeito and leave the main verb in the -ndo form. Only the first word moves:
eu / você / ele / ela estava falando
nós estávamos falando
vocês / eles / elas estavam falando
The gerund is frozen. Falando is falando whoever is doing it, so there is exactly one thing to conjugate and you already learned it in the previous point.
«Eu estava saindo de casa quando começou a chover.» (I was leaving the house when it started raining.)
«Ela estava tomando café quando o chefe chegou.» (She was having a coffee when the boss arrived.)
«Estávamos jantando quando eles chegaram.» (We were having dinner when they turned up.)
«Ninguém estava prestando atenção quando ele explicou.» (Nobody was paying attention when he explained.)
«Enquanto eu estava trabalhando, ele estava vendo televisão.» (While I was working, he was watching television.)
«Ela estava falando ao telefone enquanto dirigia.» (She was talking on the phone while she was driving.)
«Todo mundo estava rindo enquanto ele contava a história.» (Everyone was laughing while he told the story.)
«Eu estava escrevendo enquanto você dormia.» (I was writing while you slept.)
The -ndo form is built in A2 and almost nothing breaks: ler → lendo, trazer → trazendo, cair → caindo, ver → vendo, ser → sendo are all regular. The one real irregular is pôr → pondo, and its family follows: compor → compondo, supor → supondo. Worth knowing too: vindo is both the gerund of vir and its past participle, so estava vindo (was coming) and tinha vindo (had come) share a word and only the auxiliary tells them apart.
The rule of thumb is that stable states stay in the plain imperfeito, but some state verbs also take the continuous in Brazilian Portuguese: estava gostando, estava querendo, estava achando, estava sendo, estava tendo. The nuance is "for the time being" — A reunião estava sendo difícil frames the difficulty as a passing state rather than a permanent quality.
European Portuguese builds the same idea with estar a + infinitive: estava a chover, estava a trabalhar. You will meet it in books, subtitles and anything written in Lisbon, and it means exactly what estava chovendo means. Brazil uses the gerund; the A2 point on the Brazilian preference has the full picture.
Other verbs take a gerund in the imperfeito and each adds its own flavour: ia melhorando (was gradually getting better), vinha reclamando (had been complaining for a while), ficava esperando (kept waiting). They belong to their own lessons — the A2 point on the Brazilian gerund and the B1 point on aspectual periphrases — and none of them is a plain past continuous.
The textbook test for spotting a state verb does not survive contact with Brazilian speech. Grammars teach that stative verbs refuse the progressive, and refusing it is the standard way of identifying them — yet Brazilians say estou gostando, estava querendo and estou achando without a flicker. In a 2004 paper in the Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada, Renato Basso and Rodolfo Ilari argued that the class of statives therefore has to be broken into subclasses, since some of them take the progressive and some do not. Source: SciELO — RBLA
Inside this construction, estar has stopped behaving like a full lexical verb. A 2018 study of the Iboruna corpus of São Paulo speech found estar + gerúndio to be fortemente gramaticalizada — so worn in that the author classifies estar there not as a full verb but as a "lexical auxiliary", something that has travelled most of the way from vocabulary to grammar without quite arriving. That is a formal way of saying what learners feel anyway: estava fazendo is one tense wearing two words. Source: Revista de Letras — UTFPR
Get full access to grammar lessons, exercises, vocabulary and personalized review with a free Falando account.
