The Periphrastic Future (vou + infinitive)

If you learn only one way to talk about the future in Brazilian Portuguese, learn this one. The periphrastic future — the present tense of ir ("to go") followed by an infinitive — is what Brazilians say in essentially all spoken situations, and increasingly in writing too. Where English says "I'm going to eat," Brazilian Portuguese says vou comer, and it does so with almost identical logic.

How it works

Take the verb ir conjugated in the present, then add any verb in its infinitive form (the dictionary form ending in -ar, -er, or -ir). That's the whole construction. No preposition, no agreement on the second verb — the infinitive never changes.

Notice the form vão for the plural — it carries a tilde, not a circumflex or plain vao. This is the most common spelling slip English speakers make with this construction.

Why English speakers find this easy (and where the trap is)

The Brazilian periphrastic future maps onto the English "going to" future almost perfectly. Both use the verb of motion ("go" / ir) to point at an action ahead in time, and both originally carried a sense of literally heading somewhere to do something before bleaching into a pure future marker. So your English instinct is mostly reliable here.

The one trap comes from Spanish, not English. Spanish requires a preposition: voy *a comer. Brazilian Portuguese does *not. There is no a between ir and the infinitive.

"vou ir" — allowed but unusual

A famous wrinkle: what happens when the main verb is ir itself? Logically you'd get vou ir ("I'm going to go"). This is grammatically permitted and you will hear it, but most speakers find it redundant and simply use ir alone in the present, letting the time adverb carry the future meaning.

So rather than Eu vou ir amanhã, a Brazilian almost always says Eu vou amanhã. The present tense of ir comfortably expresses a planned future trip on its own — see present for future.

"a gente" takes the singular

A point that surprises learners: the extremely common colloquial "we," a gente, is grammatically third-person singular, so it pairs with vai, not vamos. It means "we" but conjugates like "he/she."

In informal speech a gente vai is far more frequent than nós vamos, though both are correct. Reserve nós vamos for slightly more careful or written registers.

Register: this future has no formality ceiling

Here's the insight that sets Brazilian Portuguese apart from the textbook picture. In many languages the "going to" future is strictly casual, and you're expected to switch to a one-word future for serious contexts. Not so in Brazil. The periphrastic future is unmarked for formality — it is equally at home in a text message, a job interview, a newspaper headline, a business email, and increasingly in academic prose.

The synthetic one-word future (anunciará, analisará) still exists and dominates formal written journalism and official documents, but in Brazil the periphrastic form has steadily climbed into registers that, in European Portuguese or older grammars, were reserved for the simple future. For a learner this is liberating: you can use vou + infinitive almost everywhere and rarely sound out of place. The places where the simple future is still genuinely preferred are covered in simple future for prediction and colloquial avoidance of the simple future.

Negation and questions

To negate, put não before the conjugated ir. To ask a question, just use rising intonation (or a question word) — word order doesn't change.

Pronouns with the infinitive

When the action verb takes an object pronoun, in everyday Brazilian speech the pronoun typically sits before the infinitive (or before the whole verb cluster). This is the natural spoken pattern; the older rule of attaching it to the end of the infinitive (vou comprá-lo) survives mainly in formal writing.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• The everyday Brazilian future is ir (present) + infinitive: vou comer, vai sair, vão chegar.
• No preposition: never vou a comer.
• The plural is vão (with a tilde); a gente takes the singular vai.
• This future is fully acceptable in casual and formal contexts — it has no formality ceiling in Brazil.
• vou ir is allowed but usually trimmed to plain vou: Eu vou amanhã.