Cognate Verbs with English (Different Constructions)

Because Portuguese and English share thousands of Latin-derived words, you can guess the meaning of importante, necessário, or decidir and be right. But a dangerous subset of these cognates has drifted in meaning over the centuries: they look like an English word and mean something different. These are false friends (falsos amigos), and verbs produce some of the most embarrassing ones. Tell a Brazilian Eu pretendo não estar doente thinking you said "I'll pretend I'm not sick," and you've actually announced "I intend not to be sick." This page collects the highest-frequency false-friend verbs and drills them as a group, because the only reliable cure is recognizing them as a class.

The reason these traps exist is that English borrowed many of these words from Latin or French at a different time, or kept an older meaning while Portuguese evolved a newer one (or vice versa). There's no logical shortcut — you have to learn each pairing. But there are only a handful that matter, so the memorization is bounded.

Pretender — to intend, NOT to pretend

This is the single most common false friend for English learners of Portuguese, and the one that causes the most confusion. Pretender means to intend / to plan to. It has nothing to do with faking or making believe.

To say pretend (to fake), Brazilian Portuguese uses fingir:

Realizar — to carry out / make happen, mostly NOT to realize

Realizar primarily means to carry out, to accomplish, to make (a dream/event) happen. It overlaps with English "realize" only in the rarer "make real" sense, not in the everyday "suddenly understand" sense.

For "realize" in the sense of suddenly understanding something, use perceber or dar-se conta (de):

Assistir — to watch / attend, NOT to assist

Assistir means to watch (TV, a movie, a game) or to attend (a class, an event). It does not mean "to assist / help." Note that in the "watch" sense, BR commonly uses assistir a with the preposition — assistir ao jogo — though in casual speech the a is often dropped (assistir o jogo).

For assist / help, use ajudar:

Esperar — to wait, to hope, AND to expect

Esperar is not a false friend so much as a triple friend: it covers wait, hope, and expect, and context tells you which. English uses three separate verbs; Portuguese uses one. This is the mirror image of the false-friend problem — instead of one form with a misleading meaning, you have one form with three legitimate meanings to disambiguate.

Discutir — often to argue, not just to discuss

Discutir can mean "discuss," but in everyday Brazilian usage it very often means to argue / to quarrel. To neutrally "discuss" a topic, conversar sobre or debater is safer.

Aplicar and applying for a job

Aplicar means "to apply" in the sense of applying a substance, a rule, or a method (aplicar a tinta, aplicar a lei). It is not used for applying for a job or a program. For that, BR uses candidatar-se (a) or the colloquial se inscrever (em / para).

Quick-reference table

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• pretender = intend (not pretend → fingir); realizar = carry out/accomplish (not "suddenly understand" → perceber / dar-se conta); assistir = watch/attend (not assist → ajudar).
• esperar legitimately means wait, hope, and expect — the surrounding grammar (subjunctive for "hope," por/object for "wait") tells you which.
• discutir frequently means "argue"; use conversar sobre for a neutral discussion.
• For applying to a job or program, use candidatar-se (a) or se inscrever, never aplicar.
• Learn these as a class — they're the false friends Brazilians hear English speakers stumble over most.