Reviews: Conversa Brasileira and ClicaBrasil

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Lauren

The University of Texas at Austin’s BrazilPod continues to impress me with its wealth of materials for students at all levels. I’ve already reviewed their beginner-level podcast Tá Falado, which was one of the first resources I discovered when I started learning Portuguese. Although it claims to be for speakers of Spanish, I had no trouble following along knowing very little Spanish, and it helped me develop good pronunciation and a solid Brazilian accent that I’m quite proud of even today.

I’ve also briefly mentioned an advanced-level resource, Conversa Brasileira, as a good resource for listening practice. While looking around for some good listening exercises today, I noticed that Conversa Brasileira has added some new annotated conversations since the last time I visited. In this post, I thought I’d revisit CB and give it a thorough review, as well as highlight a cool new Brasilpod resource for intermediate speakers.

Conversa Brasileira

No doubt about it, this is for advanced speakers. The conversations go flying by at light speed, and I find them challenging to follow even with the on-screen transcript. Caramba, qual lingua é que eu ando aprendendo por todo esse tempo? Essa não, com certeza. Watching these videos, you really get a sense of how different the everyday spoken language is from the language you learn in textbooks. It’s a language filled with diminuatives, expressions of affection, exclamations, slang, nonstandard grammar, and of course muito palavrão (though not in these videos). It was certainly intimidating, my first time in Rio, to suddenly find myself confronted with this bizarre language, a language that bears almost no relation to the language I had studied in the US. Since then, I’ve been trying to listen to as much colloquial language as possible. Conversa Brasileira is a fantastic resource for this kind of practice.

I really like the way they present the ‘teaching moments’, with professor Orlando Kelm interrogating (in English) a team of native speakers, who reply with explanations (in Portuguese). Kelm plays the role of mediator between the student viewers and the native experts, picking out the most interesting or unexpected bits from the conversation, asking questions of the Brazilians, and clarifying their answers. The combination is very effective and I only wish that more language programs would adopt this kind of format. (Semántica uses a similar approach in their Series 2 videos, though I think CB does it better). It helps that the Brazilians are obviously trained educators and have a knack for explaining Portuguese in ways that English speakers can understand. Orland Kelm, for his part, is not shy about embracing the language as it is spoken, and always defers to the judgement of the native speakers, no matter how ‘wrong’ something might be by the book. His enthusiasm for the language is contagious and is one reason why I enjoy both Tá Falado and Conversa Brasileira.

In the course of the conversations, Kelm’s team picks up on some very unusual and subtle points of the colloquial language — occasionally grammar, but more often what I would call ‘usage’ questions.

The only quarrel I have with CB is that the Flash interface doesn’t always behave itself. The actors speak so fast that it can be difficult to follow along with the on-screen transcript, especially when there’s a lot of cross-talk, and I find myself rewatching each section many times trying to catch everything that was said. When you move the scrubber bar to jump to another part of the video, though, the transcript doesn’t always sync perfectly with the dialogue. It would also be nice to have a “Rewind 10 seconds” to make it easy to go back to something you may have missed.

ClicaBrasil

If Conversa Brasileira is too advanced for many students, I was excited to discover today that Vivian Flanzer from UT Austin has put together a new website specifically for intermediate speakers, filling a huge gap in the listening resources available on the web. From the ClicaBrasil website:

 

Here you will find Portuguese language lessons that highlight aspects of Brazilian culture. These lessons are designed for intermediate to advanced students, but are accessible to everyone. Each includes videos of Brazilians from all walks of life speaking naturally about their lives and their country, and numerous activities and exercises available in PDF files. ClicaBrasil recognizes that intermediate students are ready to tackle more challenging readings and complex aspects of the language, but at the same time may still need to review some grammar topics in greater depth. All lessons integrate reading, writing, listening and comprehension, grammar, vocabulary, oral communication and cultural activities with the videos.

I haven’t explored ClicaBrasil fully just yet, but so far I am very impressed. There are seven thematic lessons, each containing four parts: an introduction, a reading, a grammar lesson, and a follow-up featuring dozens of videos. Some lessons are centered around personal themes, such as daily routines, weekend activities, or career trajectories. Others focus on the cities of Rio and Salvador. While this is a common way to teach Portuguese, I’m pleased to see that these lessons go beyond the usual surface treatment of culture that is given in textbooks. For example, the lesson on Rio explores the differences between the Zona Sul of every tourist’s postcards, and the vast northern parts of the city where samba was born, which often gets little attention.

Each lesson first presents some background material about the theme and then introduces a reading — some drawn from content available on the web, like magazine articles and song lyrics, others written specifically for ClicaBrasil. The reading for the Rio lesson is a short story by LuisFernando Veríssimo, one of my favorite authors — one whose humorous, down-to-earth writings makes him ideal for students. Unfortunately (I assume for copyright reasons), you must buy the book to read the story. Nonetheless, I really like the diversity of sources used for the readings.

After doing the reading, you can then watch specially produced videos of Brazilians talking about how the theme relates to their life. This is where ClicaBrasil shines, because there are dozens of videos of Brazilians from all over the country, so you get to hear their specific accents and manner of speaking. Because the videos are done as first-person testimonials, the speakers tend to speak slightly more clearly than they do in Conversa Brasileira, and of course there’s no cross-talk to confuse things. But, they all still speak at their natural pace,  — some slowly and clearly, others very fast and mumbly. I found some speakers easy to understand and others very difficult, and in almost all cases I had to rely on the transcriptions to clarify certain parts that I didn’t catch. I would bet that many intermediate students will find these videos challenging, at least without consulting the Portuguese transcription. Of course, challenging is good, because as students we’re always aiming to study materials that are a little bit beyond — though not too far beyond — where we are presently.

I have two criticisms of ClicaBrasil, one relating to the cultural presentation and the other to the grammar presentation. Both of these are really ‘missed opportunities’ for some deeper exploration that might have been perfect for students at the intermediate level.

The first criticism relates to the first lesson, whose theme is daily routines. This lesson appropriately features Chico Buarque’s marvelous song Cotidiano, a song that is superficially about the unchanging routine of a married couple. The first thing I noticed is that while there is a link to the lyrics, there is no link to an actual performance of the song, several of which are easily available on the web. This is too bad because the mechanical way that Buarque sings this song, and the slightly terrified look in his eyes in every version that I’ve seen, reveals the character of the lyrics very nicely.

The authors, having explained Chico Buarque’s troubles with the dictatorship in the 60s, and then having encouraged the student to engage with the lyrics in a fairly literal way in the accompanying exercises, then miss a great opportunity: to ask the student to consider the political subtext of the song. This is a theme which cannot be ignored in Buarque’s work. Buarque was a master wordsmith, and were I teaching this song, I would surely ask students to think about how the language that he uses allows him to present a political critique of life under the dictatorship, while being metaphorical enough to evade the eyes of the censors.

For example, the narrator of the song is more often the object rather than the subject of the verbs, placing him in a passive role in which he has little control over his life. The verb calar-se is featured quite prominently in another Buarque song, and it’s worth considering the meanings that it takes on when he uses it, especially in the context of censorship and repression. (For those who are interested, here’s a fascinating analysis in Portuguese of the meaning of Cotidiano). This could have been a neat exercise in which the meaning of the song would actually be revealed by looking at the grammar, word choice, repetition — but after considering all these elements in turn, the authors fail to take the final step that would allow students to synthesize all these apects into a complete understanding of the dual meanings of the song.

Beyond the videos and readings, each lesson also features a grammar lesson. The topics covered in each lesson are:

  1. the present indicative
  2. the preterit
  3. the imperfect
  4. the future preterit (aka the conditional)
  5. the present of the subjunctive
  6. the past perfect (tinha feito, etc)
  7. the imperative

The first three topics are probably presented more as a review of something the student is assumed to already know. I would guess that anyone who is able to keep up with the videos and readings in ClicaBrasil probably has a good handle on these topics already. The basic difference between the preterit and the imperfect is straighforward, and 90% of the time it’s obvious which one to use. Yet many students, including myself, still struggle with using the correct tense in those 10% of situations where it’s not at all obvious. There are many hidden complexities and exceptions that most books do not address, especially concerning the verbs estar and ser. Sometimes, either tense could be used, but with a subtle difference in meaning (Ele foi o grande amor da minha vida vs. Ele era o grande amor da minha vida). These situations, it seems to me, are fertile ground for exploration with intermediate level students, so it’s a bit disappointing that the ClicaBrasil authors opted for a cut-and-dry explanation that probably will not address the lingering dúvidas of students at this level.

As for topic #4, it’s always interesting to me to see how various teachers treat the conditional mood, since it serves many functions and can be analyzed in a number of ways (see this post and this post for my take on it). In this case, the authors opt to treat it mainly as the ‘future of the past’ (futuro do pretérito), which is an unusual approach but a useful one. Unfortunately, only a brief footnote mentions that the future of the past can also be expressed using the imperfect and the [ia + infinitive] construct, the latter being the form I hear Brazilians use most often in speech. Nor is it mentioned that these choices imply different registers or levels of formality – important information for the student to know when presented with different options for saying the same thing.

In a similar vein, the section on the Imperative only briefly mentions that sometimes the imperative is replaced by the present indicative, without acknowledging that many Brazilians use the imperative only rarely in informal speech. Again, I feel it’s important for students to have an accurate picture of how language is really used in various contexts, even if reality does not conform to the so-called ‘correct’ usage. I would prefer to have it spelled out for me when it’s appropriate to use different registers of speech so that I can sound formal or polite when I want to be polite, and casual when I want to be casual.

But I’m digressing, as I always do, talking about register. One thing I do really like about each lesson is that there are pdf worksheets with exercises to test your comprehension of the videos, to help to practice the grammar, and to get you doing some writing.

All in all, ClicaBrasil looks like a great resource that I’m looking forward to exploring more thoroughly. Personally, I’m most excited about having an archive of transcribed videos to do some active listening practice. And again, it’s phenomenal that these kind of quality materials are available on the web for free thanks to UT Austin and their great team of Portuguese educators. As with the other UT Austin sites, ClicaBrasil may eventually wind up on the Top 10 Resources page. Until then, go take a look at all the great opportunities to improve your Portuguese fluency at BrazilPod!

Posted in Reviews | 3 Comments

Portuguese ProTip: talking about hypothetical situations

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Lauren

->This is an Advanced ProTip

In the last ProTip, we looked at how shifting the tense of a verb in certain types of statements can alter the formality of our speech, without changing the meaning. In this tip, we’ll look at how changing the tenses of verbs in hypothetical statements can signal subtle cues about how realistic or serious we’re being about the hypothetical situation.

Before we dive in, let’s do a quick refresher on the subjunctive. There are three main subjunctive tenses in Portuguese: present, imperfect and future. Here are all the subjunctive tenses for the verb ser (“to be”):

  • Present subjunctive: seja, sejamos, sejam
  • Imperfect subjunctive: fosse, fossemos, fossem
  • Future subjunctive: for, formos, forem

First of all, you’ll notice there are only three forms for each tense – that’s because the eu and você/ele/ela forms are always the same in the subjunctive. This means it’s actually pretty easy to learn the subjunctive, at least for regular verbs.

In this lesson we’re going to be focusing on the imperfect and the future forms specifically, so just keep in mind what they look like. Don’t worry if you don’t know these forms cold. The imperfect subjunctive is always easy to recognize, because of the distinctive -sse endings. The future subjunctive is usually easy to recognize, too, because for regular verbs, it looks just like the infinitive, with a couple different endings slapped on for the nós and vocês forms.

Ok. Now let’s ask the question, what’s the difference between these three statements?

1. Agora que eu sou presidente, vou trabalhar pra reduzir a taxa de desmatamento em Rondônia. (Now that I am president, I will work to reduce the rate of deforestation in Rondônia)

2. Se eu fosse presidente, trabalharia pra reduzir a taxa de desmatamento em Rondônia. (If I were president, I would work to reduce the rate of deforestation in Rondônia)

3. Se eu for presidente, vou trabalhar pra reduzir a taxa de desmatamento em Rondônia. (If I am president, I will work to reduce the rate of deforestation in Rondônia)

For now, let’s just consider the first part of each sentence, the part before the comma. The first sentence starts out by asserting a simple fact: Eu sou presidente. We infer from this that the speaker is, in fact, the president.

But both #2 and #3 ask us to consider not a fact but a hypothetical situation that is not true in the present time: What if I were president? #2 frames this situation as a distant and unlikely possibility (It’s highly unlikely I will ever be president of Brazil, but let’s pretend for the moment that I am), while #3 suggests that it is not only possible but likely to be true in the future (I am not the president, but I could be if you vote for me this fall). #2 is something anyone could say, while #3 would only make sense coming from a person running for president.

In Portuguese,  the subjunctive mood is used for both types of hypothetical statements. You may already know that the subjunctive is often used for statements that are hypothetical or not yet realized (some linguists call these contrafactual statements). But let’s go a step further. As we just saw above, the tense of the subjunctive can say something about how likely you consider that hypothetical situation to be.

You can use the imperfect subjunctive when you’re talking about something you consider remote, unlikely or even impossible, or something that you’re talking about in a purely speculative way:

Se você se mudasse pra o Brasil, teria que aprender português. (If you moved to Brazil, you’d have to learn Portuguese)

In English, we show that we’re talking purely hypothetically by using the past subjunctive tense of the verb (If I were president; If you moved to Brazil).

And you can use the future subjunctive when you’re talking about something that is more of a tangible possibility:

Se você se mudar pra o Brasil, tem que me visitar! (If you move to Brazil, you have to come visit me!)

The future subjunctive in Portuguese is almost always found after the words Se and Quando when they’re used to express this kind of likely future possibility. In English, we use the regular old present tense for these kind of statements.

Note that the difference in this example is more subtle. Both are hypothetical possibilities (the person might move to Brasil in the future, but they haven’t made a final decision yet). But in the first statement, it’s still a very speculative and remote possibility. In the second, it is something they are thinking about more seriously, that is likely to happen at some point. So by using different subjunctive tenses, you can signal how serious is the idea that you’re floating.

Now let’s look at the second half of each sentence.

…………………………………formal           neutral           informal

1. Se eu fosse presidente, trabalharia/ia trabalhar/trabalhava pra reduzir a taxa de desmatamento em Rondônia. (If I were president, I would work to reduce the rate of deforestation in Rondônia)

………………………………formal            neutral

2. Se eu for presidente, trabalharei/vou trabalhar pra reduzir a taxa de desmatamento em Rondônia. (If I am president, I will work to reduce the rate of deforestation in Rondônia)

In each case, the tense you use in the second clause is determined by the tense you used in the first. But here you have some control over the formality of the statement. In the first, ‘purely hypothetical’ situation, the most technically correct choice is to use the conditional trabalharia, which makes sense because we use the conditional in English too (“would work”). But if you’ve read the previous ProTip on the interchangeable conditional and the imperfect, you know that the conditional sounds rather formal in speech, and that anytime you have the conditional, you can replace it with either the imperfect (trabalhava in this case) or the imperfect of ir plus the infinitive (ia trabalhar), both of which sound more natural in everyday conversation.

In the second, ‘tangible possibility’ example, you are talking about something that might actually become true in the future. This means that to be technically correct, you should use a future indicative tense, either the simple future (trabalharei) or the compound future (vou trabalhar). But in certain informal situations, many speakers use the regular present tense, as in:

Se você se mudar pra o Brasil, tem que me visitar!

which is what English speakers do too. You could certainly say …vai ter que me visitar! but it would sound a bit stiff.

Another situation when you might use these structures is when you’re making a suggestion to someone. Once way to make a suggestion in Portuguese is to use a formula like E se você [verb in the subjunctive]…? which roughly translates to “What if you did such and such?”

You can control how tentative or straightforward your suggestion sounds by changing the tense of the subjunctive that you use. Compare these two suggestions for dealing with a difficult coworker:

1. E se você procurasse outro emprego? (“What if you looked for a new job?”)

2. E se você falar pra sua colega? (“What if you just talk to your coworker?”)

In the first case, finding a new job is a fairly drastic step. Putting the verb procurar in the imperfect subjunctive shows that the suggestion is meant to be taken very hypothetically. You do not necessarily expect the person you’re talking to to take your advice. Your suggestion could even be a joke.

In the second case, talking to a coworker is a more straightforward suggestion. Putting the verb falar in the future subjunctive shows that you consider this suggestion to be earnest, realistic, and perhaps obvious. You think this advice is something the person you’re talking to is likely to follow.

This difference is expressed in English by using the past tense (looked) for the more tentative suggestion versus the present tense (talk) for the straightforward suggestion.

So to wrap up, by choosing your words carefully, you can give subtle cues about how serious or realistic you’re being when you talk about a hypothetical situation or course of action.

Use Se + the imperfect subjunctive when you’re talking about a situation or suggestion that is:

  • purely hypothetical
  • speculative
  • a remote possibility
  • impossible
  • a joke / not meant to be taken seriously

Use Se + the future subjunctive when you’re talking about a situation or suggestion that is:

  • likely to occur in the future or at least plausible
  • realistic
  • straightforward
  • obvious
  • meant to be taken seriously
Posted in Lessons | 14 Comments

Oi galera!

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Lauren

This site has been live for only a few months now, and people are starting to find out about it. If you’ve just discovered Hacking Portuguese, welcome!

I’ve finished writing the core articles for the site, which are all accessible from the menu above and the list to the right. Now that that’s done, I’ll be making more casual, periodic updates to the site via blog posts like this one. I have several posts ready which will become part of a Portuguese ProTips series, aimed at more advanced students who really want to finesse their command of the language. My goal with these is to try not to reinvent the wheel with grammar lessons that you can find elsewhere, but to address the finer points of usage and register that aren’t usually taught to students. That said, if there’s a specific Portuguese topic you’d like me to address, at any level, please comment, and I’d be happy to respond as best I can.

I realize that right now the content on here is geared more towards speakers at an intermediate-advanced level. Partly this is intentional – there’s already a ton of stuff on the web aimed at beginners, but very little for people who are already conversational. Still, I don’t want to scare off the beginners! My future plans for the site involve rewriting several of the articles to make them more accessible and adding more content at a beginner/low-intermediate level — including a Roadmap that has some ideas on where to start if you are just starting out with Portuguese, how to build a well-rounded study regimen for different resources, etc. For now, the Top 10 Resources page is the best place for a beginner to start.

Also – if you’re a native speaker, and you see something on here that is wrong or could be improved – please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Thanks for dropping by and stay tuned for more Portuguese goodness!

Posted in Site news | 2 Comments

Portuguese Protip: the interchangeable imperfect and conditional

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Lauren

->This is an Advanced ProTip

I’ve made a big deal on this site about how Brazilian Portuguese is really two languages: an informal, spoken language, and a formal written language. And of course it’s more complicated than that, because there are shades in between… there’s formal speech (a sermon) and informal writing (your facebook wall), and in each case the register of language you use will be different. Well, this post is about one of those subtle differences in register that you might not even know exists until you really listen closely to the language. But once you learn it, you’ll have it in your arsenal as one more way to shape the language that you use to the situation at hand. Although learning this stuff can be a bit dry, think about it this way: it’s just another way to help you express yourself – to control the color of your language. Do you want to sound flowery, professional, respectful, old-fashioned, hip, or down-to-earth? When you understand register in Portuguese, you get to choose.

The Imperfect and the Conditional

To get us started, I’ll just briefly review the imperfect and the conditional tenses, which I’m going to assume you’ve been exposed to before.

In Portuguese, you have the imperfect tense, which is one of the past tenses used to describe ongoing or habitual actions. Here’s how you form the imperfect on the regular -er verb comer, “to eat”:

eu/você/ele/ela comia

nós comíamos

eles/elas/vocês comiam

You also have the conditional tense (actually a mood, but whatever), which you use to express hypothetical actions in the same way that you use the English word “would” + verb.  Here’s how you form the conditional of comer:

eu/você/ele/ela comeria

nós comeríamos

eles/elas/vocês comeriam

Notice that the endings for the imperfect and the conditional (at least for -er and -ir verbs) are the same. The only difference is that for the imperfect, you drop the -er and add the ending, whereas for the conditional you keep the -er and add the ending after it.

Well, it turns out there’s a reason why they look very similar – and it’s that they are also functionally very similar.

One pecularity of Portuguese that many teachers don’t tell you is that the conditional and the imperfect tenses are highly interchangeable. For a long time, this was a great mystery to me. In fact, if you listen to Brazilian speech, you may be surprised to hear the imperfect used in many places where an English speaker would use the conditional. The reason is that the conditional in Portuguese has a rather formal ring to it, so most speakers tend to avoid using it in everyday conversation.

This leads us to a great tip for sounding natural in your speech:

TIP #1: In informal speech, almost anywhere you as an English speaker would use the conditional, you can also use the imperfect. The meaning will not change, but you will sound less formal and more natural.

For example, here’s two different ways to say “If I were president, I would lower taxes”:

1) Formal speech, or writing : Se eu fosse presidente, diminuiria a taxa de impostos.

2) Informal speech: Se eu fosse presidente, diminuia a taxa de impostos.

The first sentence is something you might hear in a political speech. But the second is closer to what you’d say to your friend over a beer. Most textbooks will teach you only the formal usage. But, the informal usage is just as correct, and would be used by most Brazilians in daily conversation. Yet another way that Brazilian Portuguese is really two languages!

Note, by the way, that the reverse of the above tip is not true. If you are using the imperfect to describe an ongoing event in the past, you cannot use the conditional in its place. Well, most of the time you can’t. For example:

Quando eu era criança, tinha cabelo crespo. (When I was a child, I had curly hair).

It would be wrong here to use the conditional instead of the imperfect: Quando eu seria criança, teria cabelo crespo.

Parallels in English

If all this seems a little weird or nonsensical, consider that even in English, the conditional and the imperfect are sometimes interchangeable. For example, let’s remember that the imperfect tense in Portuguese is usually translated in one of four ways in English:

Naquela época, eu acordava às 5 todos os dias.

  1. Back then, I got up at 5 every day.
  2. Back then, I was getting up at 5 every day.
  3. Back then, I used to get up at 5 every day.
  4. Back then, I would get up a 5 every day.

Note that the last option, #4, is equivalent to the English conditional: the form “would” + verb.

Another equivalence happens with the irregular English verb “could”. Compare these two sentences:

1) He was able to borrow the car whenever he wanted. (imperfect usage)  = He could borrow the car whenever he wanted.

2) He would be able to borrow the car, if he asked his parents (conditional usage) = He could borrow the car, if he asked his parents.

Here, the word “could” can imply either the imperfect usage or the conditional usage, depending on context. In the same way, the imperfect of the Portuguese verb “poder” (“to be able”) can be used both ways. Here’s those same two sentences in Portuguese:

1) Naquela época, ele podia usar o carro sempre que quisesse. (imperfect usage)

2) Ele podia/poderia usar o carro, se pedisse os pais. (conditional usage)

In the first sentence, only podia will do. But in the second, according to our tip above, either podia (the imperfect) or poderia (the conditional) can be used. In a newspaper article or a formal speech, you’d probably hear poderia. But in casual, everyday speech, most people would say podia.

The Neutral Register

So now you know that in certain situations where you would say “would” in English, you may use either the imperfect or the conditional interchangeably. Now, there is actually a third option that you should know about, which in terms of register is neutral. It would be equally at home in speech or in a piece of writing like a newspaper article. It looks like this:

3) Se eu fosse presidente, eu ia diminuir a taxa de impostos. (“If I were president, I would lower taxes.”)

This form is constructed using the imperfect of ir + the verb infinitive. Remember that the imperfect of ir is eu/você/ele/ela ia, nós íamos, eles/elas/vocês iam.

Back to the Future

Here’s where things get interesting, and we fall a bit deeper down the rabbit hole. The structure I just described using ir is the exact same construction that you use when talking about the future from a past perspective. And as it turns out, this “future of the past” is another situation where you can use either of the three options we’ve discussed. For example,

1) She said she was going to call you the next day. = Ela disse que ia ligar pra você no dia seguinte. [neutral]

This sentence describes what someone in the past said they were going to do in the future. Now, usually when talking about the future we use the present tense of ir plus the infinitive (ela vou ligar). So it makes sense that to talk about the future of the past, we use a parallel construction with a past tense of ir, in this case the imperfect tense (ela ia ligar). Here, ia ligar is a direct translation of the English “was going to call”.

But! Couldn’t we also say the exact same thing in English using the conditional?

2) She said she would call you the next day. = Ela disse que te ligaria no dia seguinte. [formal]

We could. And, as you can see, the conditional also works just fine in Portuguese too. The only difference is that it sounds more formal than ia ligar (which is why I used the more formal indirect object pronoun te instead of the informal para você). Morphologically, it’s almost as if the ia in ia ligar just jumped ahead and attached itself to the end of ligar to form the conditional, ligaria. Maybe that’s how the language evolved, who knows.

But! As we know from the tip above, any time we have the conditional, we can replace it with the imperfect. So actually, we have yet one more way to say the same thing, this time using the imperfect:

3) Ela disse que ligava pra você no dia seguinte. [informal]

This time there is no parallel structure in English; it would sound a bit awkward to say “She said she was calling you the next day”. But in Portuguese it sounds just fine, though you’d only want to use it in casual speech.

Once again, we see that there’s a functional equivalence between 1) the imperfect, 2) the conditional, and 3) the imperfect of ir + infinitive. The only difference is register. Pretty cool, huh?

So to sum up, here’s a second tip:

TIP #2: When talking about the future from a past perspective, you can use (1) the imperfect (very informal), (2) ia + the infinitive (neutral), or (3) the conditional (formal).

To my ear, ia + infinitive seems to be the most common way Brazilians talk about the future past. Perhaps any Brazilians who are reading could comment how each of these options sounds to them.

One cautionary note about the ia + infinitive formation when the infinitive you want to use is ir. Just like you would never say Eu vou ir pra a praia amanhã, but rather Eu vou pra a praia amanhã (“I’m going [to go] to the beach tomorrow”), you would also never say Ela disse que ia ir pra a praia amanhã, but instead Ela disse que ia pra a praia amanhã. (“She said she was going [to go] to the beach tomorrow”). As you can see from my translations, in English the “to go” infinitive is optional in such sentences. But in Portuguese you can’t use ir as an auxiliary for itself, so you must drop the infinitive.

Putting in into Practice

So, when might you actually use these tips? I can think of a few different situations.

1. Asking for help or making a request. Poder is useful for these situations. Instead of Você poderia me ajudar?, which is perfectly acceptable but a bit stuffy, you can simply say to your friend Podia me ajudar? Instead of Você poderia ir ao supermercado e comprar arroz? you could say Cê podia ir no supermercado e comprar arroz? (notice how I changed the preposition to make it less formal too). Depending on who you’re asking, of course, you might want to stick with the conditional, because it will make the request sound more respectful.

2. Indirect speech, otherwise known as “reporting something someone said in the past.” Instead of the quite formal Ele perguntou se nós compraríamos os passagens hoje (“He asked if we were going to buy the tickets today”) you could say, Ele perguntou se a gente ia comprar os passagens hoje, or even the very informal Ele perguntou se a gente comprava as passagens hoje. (I changed nós to a gente to make it more informal – remember that register isn’t about just changing one word – you have to think about the whole statement).

3. Talking about remote possibilities – a remote possibility being something that could plausibly happen, but isn’t imminently likely. Here you usually use a structure like [Se + statement with the imperfect subjunctive, statement with the conditional]. For example: Se seu pai soubesse, ele faria furioso (If your father knew, he’d be furious). In this case, you could replace the conditional verb with the imperfect: Se o seu pai soubesse, ficava zangado.

4. Giving advice. Here you can use the “If I were you, I would…” structure, which is just a special case of #3 above. Instead of Se eu fosse você, venderia a casa (“If I were you, I’d sell the house”), you could say Se fosse você, vendia a casa.

Now, this may all seem a bit arcane. It probably is. But I do think one of the secrets of fluency is to fine-tune your command of the language so that you have an arsenal of different ways to express yourself depending on whether you’re speaking or writing, who your audience is, and what situation you’re in. And by the way, this is exactly the kind of topic you will find treated in great depth in the book Modern Brazilian Portuguese Grammar, which I’ve recommended elsewhere on this site. If you want to really master these kinds of subtleties in Brazilian Portuguese, I highly recommend getting a copy.

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