Pretérito mais-que-perfeito simples: reading falara, fizera and fora

Open any Brazilian novel, editorial or court decision and this tense is waiting for you, usually at the exact moment the text steps back to explain what had already happened. Miss it and you lose the chronology of the paragraph: you read a flashback as the main line of the story, or take fora for the word "outside" and the sentence falls apart. Since the conversion to tinha falado is completely mechanical, thirty minutes with these forms buys you fluent reading of registers you would otherwise stumble through for years.

1. A reading tense, and only a reading tense

Start with the honest part: you are learning this form to recognize it, not to use it. In Brazil the simple pluperfect is gone from speech — completely. Nobody orders coffee with it, nobody argues with it, nobody texts it. Say eu já falara com ele out loud in São Paulo and you will get a smile, because it lands like an actor declaiming a nineteenth-century play.

But you will read it constantly: in novels, in the serious press, in judicial decisions, in academic prose. And it is easy to misread, because several of its forms are identical to words you already know. So the whole point below is built for the eye: spot the form, convert it to tinha falado, keep reading.

2. One mechanical rule builds every form

Take the third-person plural of the preterite, cut off -ram, and add the endings:

Common Pitfalls

• Reading falara as a future. One acute accent is the entire difference: falara (had spoken) against falará (will speak). In a past narrative, bet on the pluperfect — and check the accent before you decide.

• Turning every third-person plural into a pluperfect. Eles chegaram antes (They arrived earlier) is the ordinary preterite almost every time. Read it as "had arrived" only when the sentence needs a moment before another past moment, as in Quando entramos, eles já chegaram (When we went in, they had already arrived).

• Taking fora for "outside". Ele fora à praia (He had gone to the beach) is a verb, not a stray adverb. Same for vira: Ele nunca vira aquilo (He had never seen that), but Ele vira à esquerda (He turns left).

• Treating the fossils as a live tense. Tomara que dê certo (I hope it works out) takes a present subjunctive and points at the future, not the past — and quem me dera (how I wish) and pudera! (no wonder!) are just as frozen.

• Producing it in conversation. Grammatically flawless, socially theatrical: a Brazilian hearing eu já falara (I had already spoken) thinks of a stage, not of a past. Say eu já tinha falado instead.

• Mixing the two systems inside one text. If you do write formally enough to use falara (had spoken), stay with it through the passage; sliding between falara and tinha falado line by line reads as an unsteady hand rather than as style.

falara comes down from Latin almost unchanged

The simple pluperfect is the direct heir of the Latin indicative pluperfect: amaveram → amara, debueramus → devêramos, partiverant → partiram. Portuguese kept the inherited form nearly intact, which grammarians cite as one of the clearest signs of how conservative the Portuguese verb is — closer to its Latin shape than most of the Romance family.

Spanish kept the same form but gave it a different job

Spanish inherited exactly the same form — amara — but by the early fifteenth century it had drifted into the imperfect subjunctive, which is why a modern Spanish speaker reads amara as the equivalent of amase. Portuguese never made that switch, so falara still means tinha falado. If you already speak Spanish, this is the rare spot where the shared form is a trap rather than a shortcut.

Source: «Sobre a história do mais-que-perfeito simples do indicativo» — Ciberdúvidas da Língua Portuguesa.