Regular Conditional Forms

The condicional (sometimes called futuro do pretérito in older grammars) is the Portuguese counterpart of English would + verb. It is used to soften requests, speculate about the past, and — most importantly — describe hypothetical situations that depend on an unreal condition: I would buy that house if I had the money. Learning its formation is almost trivial, because, like the simple future, the conditional is built by attaching a fixed set of endings directly to the full infinitive. No stem changes, no vowel shifts — just infinitive + ending.

Formation: infinitive + endings

Take any infinitive — falar, comer, partir, trabalhar, escrever, dormir, cozinhar — and attach the conditional endings. The ending is the same across all three conjugation classes.

Two things to notice from the start. First, the eu and ele/ela/você forms are identical — context will tell you the subject. Second, the nós and vós forms take a written accent on the í (-íamos, -íeis). Without the accent the word is spelled incorrectly, and a reader would mentally stress the wrong syllable.

Falar (-ar verb)

Comer (-er verb)

Partir (-ir verb)

A suspicious resemblance: conditional vs. imperfect

Look closely at the endings -ia, -ias, -ia, -íamos, -íeis, -iam and then look at the imperfect of -er and -ir verbs. They are exactly the same. Compare:

The difference is not in the endings but in the base they attach to. The imperfect attaches endings to the stem (com-), while the conditional attaches them to the full infinitive (comer-). This is why the conditional always keeps an -r- before the ending: comeria, partiria, trabalharia. Drop that -r- and you collapse the conditional into the imperfect, which changes the meaning entirely.

More regular verbs in action

Because the paradigm is so uniform, you can conjugate any regular verb once you know the infinitive. Here are examples drawn from everyday domains — cooking, travel, family, and work.

Clitic placement in the conditional

The conditional behaves like the simple future with object pronouns: it takes mesoclisis by default — the pronoun wedges inside the verb. In a neutral affirmative clause:

The structure is stem + clitic + ending, with two hyphens. As in the simple future, this is largely a written phenomenon: in speech, Portuguese speakers restructure with a subordinating word, a negation, or the imperfect indicative, all of which avoid mesoclisis.

When a proclisis trigger is present — negation (não, nunca, ninguém, nada), subordinators (que, se, quando), or certain adverbs (já, também, só) — the clitic jumps to before the verb, and mesoclisis disappears:

See Mesoclisis and Proclisis triggers for the full rules.

Quick side-by-side with the future

Because both tenses attach endings to the infinitive, they look like mirror images of each other. Only the endings differ:

Comparison with English

English would is a one-word auxiliary that combines with any verb: I would eat, you would go, they would leave. Portuguese folds the would directly into the verb ending. That means the subject-pronoun use patterns differ: English almost always says I would, while Portuguese can drop the pronoun because the ending already signals the person (eu comeria / comeria).

Be careful, too, of the overlap between English would as conditional ("I would go, if…") and English would as habitual past ("When we were kids, we would go to the beach every summer"). The second would is not conditional in Portuguese — it is the imperfect indicative:

That íamos is imperfect (habit), not conditional (hypothesis). A conditional iríamos would change the meaning to we would go in a hypothetical sense — which is not what the English sentence means. This is one of the commonest translation traps for English speakers.

Common Mistakes

The accent on comeríamos, falaríamos, partiríamos is not optional. Without it, the stress falls on -ri- instead of -rí-, which is a real pronunciation error and a real spelling error. The same applies to the archaic -íeis form (comeríeis, falaríeis).

Keep the -r- visible. Falaia does not exist; falaria is the conditional, falava is the imperfect. These are three different words with three different meanings.

Both versions are grammatical. Colloquial European Portuguese freely uses the imperfect indicative (comia) in place of the conditional (comeria) in hypothetical clauses, and you will hear it constantly. In writing or in any careful register, comeria is the full conditional and the safer choice. See Conditional in Hypothetical Sentences for more.

English would for past habit corresponds to the imperfect, not the conditional. If you mean used to do X, the verb is comia, jogava, ia — never comeria, jogaria, iria.

Only the nós and vós forms carry the accent (falaríamos, falaríeis). The singular and third-person plural forms (falaria, falarias, falaria, falariam) have no written accent — the stress is naturally on the -i- of -ia.

Key takeaways

• Formation: full infinitive + -ia, -ias, -ia, -íamos, -íeis, -iam. Never drop the -r-.
• The nós and vós forms require a written accent on the í.
• The endings are identical to the imperfect of -er/-ir verbs — the -r- of the infinitive is the only visible difference.
• English would covers both conditional (hypothetical) and habitual past; in Portuguese the habitual sense is the imperfect, not the conditional.
• In affirmative clauses, clitics take mesoclisis: falar-te-ia. Proclisis triggers cancel it: não te falaria.
• Almost every verb is regular in the conditional. Only three verbs have contracted stems — see Irregular Conditional Forms.