Pretérito imperfeito: falava, comia, era

English hands the same territory to three different structures — I used to live, I was living, I lived — and Portuguese can use one imperfeito form in these contexts. That is good news going in, because morava can correspond to all three, depending on the context. It is harder coming out: you cannot translate the imperfeito word for word, and "used to" in particular over-fires, producing an unintended meaning (Eu sabia o caminho normally means "I knew the way"; "I used to know the way" is possible if you mean that you no longer know it). Learn this tense and past-tense Portuguese stops being a list of events and starts having a setting: what the place was like, how old you were, what was going on when the thing happened. It is also, quietly, how Brazilians are polite — queria, podia, precisava — so it will come up at every counter you stand at.

Two sets of endings, and one does double duty

Take the infinitive, drop -ar, -er or -ir, and add:

-ER and -IR verbs share a single set — there is no third pattern to learn. (The tu forms add an -s; see the exceptions below.)

Habits

• «Todo sábado a gente ia à feira com a minha avó.» (Every Saturday we went to the market with my grandmother.)

• «Ele acordava às cinco para pegar o primeiro ônibus.» (He used to get up at five to catch the first bus.)

• «Nas férias, brincávamos na rua o dia inteiro.» (In the holidays we played in the street all day long.)

• «Meu pai tocava violão depois do jantar.» (My father used to play the guitar after dinner.)

Scenes and states

• «Era domingo e a padaria estava fechada.» (It was Sunday and the bakery was closed.)

• «A casa da praia era pequena, mas tinha um jardim enorme.» (The beach house was small, but it had a huge garden.)

• «Eu tinha dez anos quando ganhei a minha primeira bicicleta.» (I was ten when I got my first bicycle.)

• «Fazia frio e ninguém queria sair.» (It was cold and nobody wanted to go out.)

tu adds an -s

Falavas, eras, tinhas, vinhas. You will meet these in books, in song lyrics and in parts of the South and the North, where tu is the everyday pronoun. The você forms in the table are widely used and are a useful starting point; follow the local pattern when using tu.

podia is doing two things at once

Antes eu podia correr dez quilômetros is past ability. Você podia me ajudar? is a request being made right now. Same form, and only the sentence around it tells you which one you are hearing.

tinha medo or estava com medo?

Common expressions for passing physical states use estar com: estava com fome, estava com sono, estava com pressa. Common ter expressions include: tinha razão, tinha tempo. With fear both exist and can highlight different meanings — tinha medo de avião often describes a fear you carried around, while estava com medo highlights being frightened at that moment. The exact distinction depends on context.

havia is the written twin of tinha

For "there was", speech reaches for tinha: Tinha muita gente na rua. Writing prefers Havia muita gente na rua. Same meaning, different register — it is the ter vs haver split from A2, now in the past.

Brazilian children open a game of make-believe in the imperfeito. Before the fiction starts, someone hands out the roles in the past tense — "Agora eu era o bandido, e você era a polícia" — and nothing whatsoever is being remembered; the tense is simply the door into a story, which is also why era uma vez opens fairy tales. Chico Buarque and Sivuca’s João e Maria, listed as a 1977 song in the artist’s official catalog, uses that same trick in its opening: "Agora eu era o herói". Sources: Ambiente de Leitura — José Augusto Carvalho, Chico Buarque — official catalog

Linguists study variation between past forms. In some conditional patterns, Brazilians use se eu fosse você, comprava mais livros alongside se eu fosse você, compraria mais livros, with the same intended meaning. A 2021 article in Tabuleiro de Letras by Aline da Silva Santos and Norma Lucia Fernandes de Almeida gathered studies from across the country to ask whether that is stable variation or a change still in progress. The review found signs of change, especially in periphrases with ir, while calling for further research. Source: Tabuleiro de Letras