First Conjugation: -ar Verbs

The -ar verbs make up the first conjugation (primeira conjugação) — the largest, most regular, and most productive class in Brazilian Portuguese. Master this single set of endings and you unlock thousands of verbs at once, plus every new verb the language will ever invent. This is the highest-leverage paradigm a beginner can learn.

Why -ar is the verb you learn first

Three facts make -ar the place to start:

1. It is the biggest class — more verbs end in -ar than in -er and -ir combined.
2. It is the most regular — the vast majority of -ar verbs follow the model below with no surprises.
3. It is the only open class — borrowings and coinages all become -ar verbs (deletar, postar, googlar, printar, tuitar), so it keeps growing.

If you learn one pattern in your first week, learn this one.

The endings across the main tenses

We'll use falar (to speak) as the model verb. Drop the -ar to get the stem fal-, then add the endings. Below are the three tenses you need first: present, preterite (simple past), and imperfect (the "used to / was doing" past).

Notice that vós is simply absent — Brazilian Portuguese does not use it (the vós form faláveis is archaic and will only appear in old texts). And tu is regional: outside the South and Northeast, most Brazilians use você with the 3sg form instead.

The famous overlap: falamos = present AND preterite

There is one collision built into the -ar class that you should meet head-on: the nós form is identical in the present and the preterite. Falamos means both "we speak" and "we spoke." Moramos means both "we live" and "we lived."

This is not a defect you need to fix — it is resolved entirely by context, especially time words like hoje (today), ontem (yesterday), agora (now), no ano passado (last year). Brazilians never even notice the ambiguity, because the surrounding sentence always disambiguates.

High-frequency -ar verbs to learn now

These ten verbs are everywhere in daily Brazilian speech, and every one follows the falar pattern exactly.

A small heads-up on chegar and ficar: their stems end in a sound that needs a spelling tweak before the -ei of the eu preterite (cheguei, fiquei) to keep the hard sound. That's a spelling rule, not an irregularity — the endings are still the standard -ar endings.

gostar de — the preposition is not optional

The single biggest -ar trap for English speakers is gostar. In English "to like" takes a direct object: "I like coffee." In Brazilian Portuguese, gostar demands the preposition de before whatever you like: gostar de something. Leaving out de is the most common -ar mistake learners make.

When de meets the definite articles, it contracts: de + o = do, de + a = da, de + os = dos, de + as = das.

The verb precisar (to need) behaves the same way when followed by a noun: preciso de ajuda (I need help). Many beginners overgeneralize this and start adding de everywhere — but most -ar verbs take a plain direct object (comprar pão, estudar matemática).

a gente fala vs nós falamos

In conversation, the -ar class shows the a gente / nós competition vividly. A gente means "we" but takes the 3sg form (fala), not the nós form (falamos). Both are correct; a gente is more colloquial and extremely common in speech.

Mixing them — saying a gente falamos — is a classic error. The pronoun a gente is grammatically singular, full stop. See the dedicated a gente page for the full logic.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• -ar is the largest, most regular, and only productive class — and the first you should master.
• Present (-o, -as, -a, -amos, -am), preterite (-ei, -aste, -ou, -amos, -aram), imperfect (-ava, -avas, -ava, -ávamos, -avam). Vós is dropped entirely.
• Falamos is identical in present and preterite — context (especially time words) resolves it.
• gostar de and precisar de require the preposition; de contracts to do / da / dos / das.
• In speech, a gente fala (3sg) competes with nós falamos — never blend them into a gente falamos.