Present Indicative of Ir

Ir means "to go," and it is one of the three or four verbs you simply cannot do without in Brazilian Portuguese. It carries physical movement, like English "go," but it also does the heavy lifting of the spoken future: the sentence Brazilians actually use for "I'm going to eat" or "I'll eat" is built on ir. Learning these five forms unlocks an enormous amount of real conversation.

The forms are suppletive

If you try to find the infinitive ir inside its conjugated forms — vou, vai, vamos, vão — you will fail. There is no shared stem. This is because ir is suppletive: its present tense descends from a completely different Latin verb, vadere (to advance, to rush), while the infinitive ir comes from Latin ire. Two different verbs collapsed into one over the centuries, and the seams never healed.

This is the same phenomenon English has in "go" versus "went" (where "went" was borrowed from the old verb "wend"). So the lesson is simple and a little liberating: do not look for logic in the spelling. Memorize the forms as raw vocabulary.

The tu form is vais (regional — heard in parts of the Northeast and in Rio Grande do Sul, often replaced by tu vai in casual speech). There is no vós in Brazilian Portuguese. Note the nasal diacritics: vão carries the tilde, and it is a real spelling error to write vao.

Use 1: physical movement

The first job of ir is the same as English "go" — moving from one place toward another.

"Ir" and its preposition: a or em

After ir, the destination is normally introduced by a (often contracted: a + o = ao, a + a = à). This is the careful, written-standard choice.

But in colloquial Brazilian speech, you will constantly hear em (contracted to no, na) instead:

Both are heard daily. Vou ao banco is what you write and what a teacher will mark as correct; vou no banco is what most Brazilians actually say out loud. English speakers find this jarring because "go in the bank" sounds like you are physically inside it — but in Brazilian Portuguese ir em simply means "go to." Use a/ao/à in writing and you will never be wrong; recognize em/no/na so spoken Portuguese makes sense.

Use 2: the spoken future (the big one)

Here is the most important thing on this page. Ir + an infinitive is the dominant way Brazilians express the future. The structure is exactly like English "going to": conjugate ir in the present, then add a verb in the infinitive.

In speech, this periphrastic future has almost entirely replaced the "simple" future like comerei ("I will eat") — by most counts well over ninety percent of the time. A Brazilian who wants to say "I'll call you tomorrow" says vou te ligar amanhã, not ligarei amanhã. The form comerei still exists, but it now sounds bookish or emphatic and lives mostly in writing. If you only learn one way to talk about the future, learn this one.

Notice that with movement verbs this can look doubled — vou ir ("I'm going to go") is grammatical but clunky; Brazilians usually just say vou and let context carry the movement: amanhã eu vou na festa ("I'm going to the party tomorrow").

Use 3: "Vamos!" — the everyday let's

The nós form vamos doubles as the standard first-person-plural imperative — the way to say "let's go" or, more broadly, "let's [do something]." It is arguably the single most frequent imperative in Brazilian speech.

You will also hear the reduced colloquial form vambora or bora ("c'mon, let's go"), built from vamos embora. Bora! on its own is an everyday call to action among friends. Recognize it; it is informal but extremely common.

Common Mistakes

English speakers carry a handful of predictable errors into ir. Here are the ones to watch.

The "going to" structure tempts English speakers to insert a word for "to," but the infinitive attaches directly: vou comer, never vou a comer.

Key takeaways

• The present of ir is suppletive: vou, vai, vamos, vão (regional vais). Memorize, don't analyze.
• Vão always carries the tilde.
• Ir + infinitive is the everyday future and covers both "going to" and "will."
• After ir, use a/ao/à in writing; expect em/no/na in speech.
• Vamos and reduced bora are the go-to "let's" of Brazilian conversation.