Breakdown of Ela compraria roupas novas se o salário dela fosse melhor.
Questions & Answers about Ela compraria roupas novas se o salário dela fosse melhor.
Compraria is the conditional tense of comprar and expresses a hypothetical action: she *would buy*.
In this structure:
- Main clause (result): Ela *compraria roupas novas → She *would buy new clothes
- If-clause (condition): se o salário dela *fosse melhor → if her salary *were better
Portuguese uses exactly this pairing for unreal or unlikely conditions:
- Conditional in the main clause (compraria)
- Imperfect subjunctive in the if-clause (fosse)
So you use compraria (would buy), not comprou (bought) or comprará (will buy), because the sentence is not describing a real past or planned future event, but a hypothetical situation.
Fosse is the imperfect subjunctive of ser. In Portuguese, when you talk about hypothetical, unreal, or unlikely conditions introduced by se (if), you typically use:
- Imperfect subjunctive in the if-clause:
- se o salário dela *fosse melhor* (if her salary were better)
- Conditional in the main clause:
- ela compraria (she would buy)
Using era would sound like you are describing a normal, ongoing situation, not a hypothetical one.
Compare:
Se o salário dela fosse melhor, ela compraria roupas novas.
If her salary were better, she would buy new clothes. (unreal condition)Quando o salário dela era melhor, ela comprava roupas novas.
When her salary was better, she used to buy new clothes. (real past situation)
Not in this meaning.
- Se o salário dela *fosse melhor, ela compraria roupas novas* expresses an unreal, imagined condition (her salary is not better right now).
- Se o salário dela *era melhor would be interpreted as talking about a real past situation (e.g., “If her salary used to be better, then why did she stop buying clothes?”), and you would normally complete it with something like: - … ela comprava mais coisas.* (she used to buy more things)
For a hypothetical present or unreal situation, Portuguese prefers se + imperfect subjunctive (fosse), not era.
Yes, the order is flexible, and that version is very natural:
- Ela compraria roupas novas se o salário dela fosse melhor.
- Se o salário dela fosse melhor, ela compraria roupas novas.
Both are correct and mean the same thing.
The only detail: when the if-clause comes first, you normally use a comma before the main clause:
- Se o salário dela fosse melhor, ela compraria roupas novas. ✅
When the if-clause comes second, you typically don’t use a comma: - Ela compraria roupas novas se o salário dela fosse melhor. ✅
You can say seu salário, but salário dela avoids ambiguity.
- seu salário = your salary, his salary, her salary, or their salary, depending on context.
- salário dela = specifically her salary.
So:
Se o *seu salário fosse melhor, você compraria roupas novas?
→ “If *your salary were better, would you buy new clothes?”Ela compraria roupas novas se o *salário dela fosse melhor.
→ “She would buy new clothes if *her salary were better.”
In this sentence, using dela makes it very clear that the salary belongs to ela (she), not to another person.
Dela is a separate word. It comes from the preposition de + the pronoun ela:
- de + ela → dela
Literally, dela means “of her”. So:
- o salário dela = “the salary of her” → her salary
- o carro dela = “the car of her” → her car
Portuguese often uses de + pronoun instead of a possessive adjective when it wants to be very clear about the owner:
- o salário dela vs seu salário (her salary vs her/your/his/their salary)
Yes, you can say:
- Ela compraria roupas novas se o salário fosse melhor.
In many contexts, listeners would automatically understand it as her salary, because ela is the only person mentioned.
However:
- o salário fosse melhor = “the salary were better” (whose salary? depends on context)
- o salário dela fosse melhor = explicitly “her salary were better”
So, omitting dela is possible, but it makes the sentence slightly less explicit.
Both roupas novas and novas roupas are grammatically possible, but the usual and most neutral way here is roupas novas.
General idea:
- Adjective after the noun (roupas novas) = more literal, descriptive: clothes that are new.
- Adjective before the noun (novas roupas) can sometimes add a nuance (subjective, emotional, or idiomatic), though with novo/nova it depends a lot on context.
In everyday speech about simply buying new clothes, you will typically hear:
- roupas novas (very natural and common)
Novas roupas is not wrong, but it often feels a bit more marked or styled, or can suggest “other clothes” / “different clothes” in some contexts.
This is about agreement:
Roupas novas
- roupas = noun, feminine plural
- novas = adjective, feminine plural
→ Adjective agrees in gender and number with the noun.
salário… melhor
- salário = noun, masculine singular
- melhor = a comparative form of bom (good → better)
- As a comparative, melhor doesn’t change in number here:
- um salário melhor (a better salary)
- salários melhores (better salaries)
→ In the singular, you just have melhor; there’s no separate masculine/feminine form.
So: novas changes to match roupas, and melhor is a fixed comparative form used here in the singular.
Yes, grammatically you can, because Portuguese is a pro-drop language (it often omits subject pronouns):
- Ela compraria roupas novas se o salário dela fosse melhor.
- Compraria roupas novas se o salário dela fosse melhor.
Both are correct.
However:
- With Ela, the subject is immediately clear.
- Without Ela, the subject (he/she/you formal) must be understood from previous context.
In isolation (as a standalone sentence), most teachers and materials prefer to keep the subject: Ela compraria…
In this sentence, they are very close in meaning:
- Ela compraria roupas novas se o salário dela fosse melhor.
- Ela iria comprar roupas novas se o salário dela fosse melhor.
Both can be translated as: She would buy new clothes if her salary were better.
Nuances:
- compraria is the simple conditional, a bit more compact and often preferred in writing.
- iria comprar is a periphrastic construction (literally “would go to buy”), common in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Sometimes it can feel slightly more colloquial or emphasize the intention to buy, but in many contexts they are interchangeable.
Some key points:
- Ela → É-la
- Open é sound, stress on É.
- compraria → com-pra-RI-a
- Stress on ri: /kõpɾaˈɾi.a/
- The final -ia has two syllables: i-a, not just ya.
- roupas → HO-pas (Brazilian r at start is guttural, like French r or English h in some accents)
- novas → NÓ-vas (stress on nó)
- salário → sa-LÁ-rio
- Stress on lá: /saˈlaɾju/
- rio at the end is often like ryu in Brazilian Portuguese.
- dela → DE-la (short e, clear l)
- fosse → FÓ-sse
- Double ss = /s/ (not /z/), stress on fo.
Spoken smoothly, the rhythm will roughly be:
- É-la com-pra-RI-a HÓU-pas NÓ-vas se o sa-LÁ-rio DE-la FÓ-sse me-LHOR.