The Gerund (Gerúndio) in BR Portuguese

If you want to sound Brazilian, learn to love the gerund. The form ending in -ndo (falando, comendo, partindo) is woven into almost every conversation in Brazil — it expresses what you are doing right now, how you did something, and even works as a compact way to attach extra information to a sentence. This page surveys the whole landscape so you can see how the pieces fit together; each individual use then has its own dedicated page.

The single most important fact to internalize up front: the gerund is the defining feature that separates Brazilian Portuguese from European Portuguese. Where a Brazilian says Estou trabalhando ("I'm working"), a Lisbon speaker says Estou a trabalhar ("I'm at-working"). Both are correct Portuguese, but the gerund construction is so dominant in Brazil that hearing it is like hearing an accent — it instantly signals "this is Brazilian." We will return to this contrast throughout.

How to form the gerund

The gerund is completely regular for the overwhelming majority of verbs. Take the infinitive, drop the final -r, and add -ndo. In practice this gives you three patterns based on the conjugation class:

The famous "irregular" verbs are barely irregular in the gerund — they follow the same drop-the-r, add--ndo rule, which only looks surprising because their infinitives are short:

Notice that vindo is the gerund of vir (to come) — but it is also, confusingly, the past participle of vir. Context tells them apart: Ele está vindo ("He is coming," gerund) vs. Ele tinha vindo ("He had come," participle). For the full mechanics of formation, including spelling details, see Forming the Gerund.

The five uses at a glance

The gerund does five distinct jobs in Brazilian Portuguese. Each gets its own page, but here is the whole map so you can recognize them in the wild.

1. Progressive aspect (with estar) — what is happening right now

This is the workhorse: estar + gerund expresses an action in progress, exactly like English "to be + -ing."

This construction is so central that it has its own detailed treatment — see Estar + Gerúndio: The Progressive and the Gerund with Estar drill page.

2. Adverbial gerund — a simultaneous action

Here the gerund describes a second action happening at the same time as the main verb, or the circumstance in which it happens. English often uses a separate clause ("while...") or just "-ing."

This is covered in Adverbial Gerund.

3. Gerund of manner — how something is done

A close cousin of the adverbial use: the gerund explains the means or manner by which the main action is accomplished. It answers "how?"

4. Reduced relative clause — modifying a noun

The gerund can attach to a noun and describe it, replacing a full relative clause ("the girl who was crying" → "the girl crying").

This use is treated in Gerund as Reduced Relative Clause.

5. Absolute construction — a gerund clause with its own subject

In more elevated speech and especially in writing, a gerund phrase can carry its own subject and frame the whole sentence, expressing time, cause, or condition.

See Absolute Gerund Constructions for the full picture.

Why Brazilians reach for the gerund so much

The deep reason the gerund dominates Brazilian speech is that it is the most economical way to bundle a second action onto a main verb without starting a new clause. Instead of saying "She left and while she was leaving she was singing," a Brazilian compresses it into Ela saiu cantando — three words. The gerund lets you stack circumstances, manners, and simultaneous actions with almost no grammatical machinery.

For an English speaker this is mostly good news, because English also leans heavily on -ing forms. "She came in crying," "I learned by watching," "It's raining" — these map almost one-to-one onto the Brazilian gerund. The danger is not in producing the gerund but in overcorrecting: English speakers who have studied European Portuguese sometimes try to use estar a + infinitivo, which sounds stiff and foreign in Brazil.

The BR vs. PT contrast in one table

Because this difference is so defining, here is the side-by-side that every learner should burn into memory:

Note the spelling of está and estavam with their accents — a missing accent on está changes it to esta ("this," feminine), which is a different word entirely.

A note on "gerundismo"

You may hear Brazilians complain about gerundismo — the perceived overuse of stacked future gerunds in call-center and corporate speech, as in Vou estar transferindo a sua ligação ("I'm going to be transferring your call") instead of the simpler Vou transferir a sua ligação. This is a style criticism, not a grammar rule: the construction is perfectly grammatical, just verbose. Learners should recognize it but need not imitate it. The everyday gerund uses on this page are above reproach.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Form the gerund by dropping -r and adding -ndo: falar → falando, comer → comendo, partir → partindo.
• The gerund is invariable — no gender, no number, no agreement, ever.
• It has five jobs: progressive (está chovendo), simultaneous action (saí cantando), manner (aprendi falando), reduced relative (a menina chorando), and absolute clause (sendo assim).
• The gerund is the single most audible marker of Brazilian Portuguese. Avoid the European estar a + infinitivo entirely.