Need more Portuguese? Try the Portuguese courses at Udemy, the audio and video lessons at Portuguesepod101.com, and the Portuguese Interlinear book (with English translations below the Portuguese text)
5. Portuguese Subject Pronouns
The subject pronouns are not too difficult to learn in Portuguese, but there is more than one way to say you, it, and they.
singular (one person) | plural (more than one person) | ||
eu | I | nós | we |
tu | you (informal - not used in most of Brazil) | vós | you (informal - also not used in Brazil) |
ele ela você o senhor a senhora |
he / it (masculine) she / it (feminine) you (informal) you (formal masculine) you (formal feminine) |
eles elas vocês os senhores as senhoras |
they (masculine) they (feminine) you (informal) you (formal masculine) you (formal feminine) |
The word tu is only used in the region of southern Brazil, where they normally don't use você, and vós is not used at all. We use the word você when talking to family or friends. If you're
talking to one person that you don't know, you must use o senhor or a
senhora (Mr or Mrs.) with the same verb conjugations as ele / ela / você. For the plural, use os senhores or as senhoras with the same verb conjugations as eles / elas / vocês.
In Portugal, o senhor and a senhora are very formal ways to say you. Você is considered semiformal and tu is considered informal.
Note that ele and ela are also used to mean it, depending on if the noun is masculine or feminine.
If you enjoy the tutorials, then please consider buying French, Informal French, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, or Dutch Language Tutorials as a PDF e-book with free mp3s and free lifetime updates.
Buy French TutorialPlease consider sending a donation of any amount to help support ielanguages.com. Thank you!
FluentU offers authentic videos in French, Spanish, German, English, Chinese and Japanese. Learn from captions and translations and enjoy access to ALL languages!
Learn Spanish, French, German, Italian, Mandarin Chinese and English with authentic videos by Yabla that include subtitles and translations.
Learn to read languages with interlinear bilingual books that include the original language and an English translation below in a smaller font.
Hundreds of free and paid online language learning video courses at Udemy. By native speakers and experts, from Arabic to Zulu.