Subjunctive after Verbs of Desire and Will

When you want, ask, order, or advise someone else to do something, Brazilian Portuguese puts that something in the subjunctive. Eu quero que você venha — "I want you to come." This is one of the first and most important places the subjunctive shows up, and it is the single biggest structural difference between Portuguese and English in this area. English uses an infinitive ("I want you to come"); Portuguese cannot. It uses que plus a conjugated subjunctive verb. Getting this pattern into your muscle memory early will save you from the most common mistake learners make.

The core logic: you're describing a wanted action, not a fact

The subjunctive marks actions that live in the realm of wishes and intentions rather than established reality. When you say quero que você venha, the coming has not happened — it is something you want to become true. The action exists only as a desire in your head. That is precisely what the subjunctive is for.

This logic generalizes: any time you express a will about what someone else should do — wanting, requesting, ordering, advising, allowing, forbidding — the dependent action is hypothetical, so it goes subjunctive.

The structure: [verb] + que + [subject] + [subjunctive verb]

The pattern almost never changes:

Main subject + verb of will + que + new subject + subjunctive verb

Notice that English collapses the two clauses into one ("I want you to come"), but Portuguese keeps two full clauses joined by que, each with its own subject and verb. The change of subject is the key: I want, but you come.

The cardinal English-speaker error

English speakers, reaching for "I want you to come," produce one of two wrong things:

• Eu quero você vir — copying the English infinitive structure.
• Quero te vir — trying to cram the object pronoun in.

Both are wrong. The only correct structure is Eu quero que você venha. Burn this in: querer que + subjunctive, never querer + object + infinitive the way English does.

There is one important exception that actually matches English intuition: when the subject of both verbs is the same person, Portuguese drops que and uses a plain infinitive, just like English.

Here I want and I travel — one subject, so no que, no subjunctive, just the infinitive viajar. Compare Eu quero que ela viaje ("I want her to travel") — two subjects, so que + subjunctive. The rule: same subject → infinitive; different subject → que + subjunctive.

The verbs that trigger this

All of these express will, request, or permission, and all take que + subjunctive when the subjects differ:

Note the last one: a gente ("we," literally "the people") is grammatically third-person singular, so it takes the same subjunctive form as ele/ela — espere, not esperemos. This is one of the great conveniences of Brazilian speech: a gente lets you avoid the -mos forms entirely.

Past requests: the imperfect subjunctive

When the verb of will is in the past, the subjunctive shifts to the imperfect. The pattern is identical; only the tense moves to match.

The rule of thumb: present trigger → present subjunctive (venha, fale); past trigger → imperfect subjunctive (viesse, falasse).

Common Mistakes

1. Copying the English infinitive structure with a different subject. The number-one error.

2. Squeezing in an object pronoun instead of a clause.

3. Using que + subjunctive when the subject is the same. If I want and I do the action, you need a plain infinitive.

4. Using the indicative after the trigger. Learners write quero que você vem, mirroring the indicative they'd use in a statement.

5. Treating a gente as plural. Because it means "we," learners apply the -mos ending.

Key Takeaways

• Verbs of wanting, asking, ordering, advising, allowing, and forbidding take que
  • subjunctive when the subjects differ.
• The wanted action is not a fact — it's a desired outcome — which is exactly why it's subjunctive.
• Same subject → plain infinitive (quero viajar). Different subject → que
  • subjunctive (quero que você viaje).
• Present trigger → present subjunctive; past trigger → imperfect subjunctive.
• A gente ("we") is grammatically third-person singular: que a gente vá, never vamos.