Colhemos o tomate hoje.

Portuguese often leaves out subject pronouns when the verb ending already makes the subject clear.

Here, colhemos already tells you the subject is we. So:

• Colhemos o tomate hoje. = We harvest / are harvesting the tomato today.
• Nós colhemos o tomate hoje. = also correct, but nós adds emphasis, contrast, or clarity.

This is very normal in European Portuguese.

Colhemos is the 1st person plural form of the verb colher.

So it means we pick / we harvest.

An important point: this form can also be the past simple form we harvested, depending on context. In this sentence, hoje (today) makes the present-time reading the natural one.

In Portuguese, the simple present can often cover both ideas, depending on context.

So colhemos o tomate hoje can be understood as:

• we harvest the tomato today
• we are harvesting the tomato today

If you want to make the ongoing action very explicit in European Portuguese, you would often use:

• Estamos a colher o tomate hoje.

That estar a + infinitive structure is the usual European Portuguese way to say are harvesting.

O is the masculine singular definite article, meaning the.

So o tomate means the tomato.

In this sentence, the article makes the noun sound specific: a particular tomato, or a specific tomato crop/item already known from context.

Portuguese uses articles very naturally in places where English sometimes would not, but here the most basic reading is simply the tomato.

Because noun gender in Portuguese is not decided only by the last letter.

A noun ending in -e can be masculine or feminine. Tomate happens to be masculine, so it takes:

• o tomate

Not a tomate.

This is something learners often just have to memorize noun by noun.

Yes, tomate is singular, so the most direct meaning is the tomato.

If you wanted to say the tomatoes, you would normally say:

• os tomates

or just:

• tomates, depending on context.

In some agricultural or general contexts, a singular noun can sometimes refer to a crop or product type, but for a learner, the safest reading here is simply singular: the tomato.

No. Portuguese word order is fairly flexible here.

All of these are possible:

• Colhemos o tomate hoje.
• Hoje colhemos o tomate.
• O tomate colhemos hoje. — possible, but much more marked and less neutral

The version with hoje at the end is a normal, neutral sentence. Putting hoje at the beginning gives extra emphasis to today.

Two parts often cause trouble:

• lh is a palatal sound, roughly like the lli in some pronunciations of million, but it is not exactly the same.
• final -s in European Portuguese usually sounds like sh.

So colhemos sounds approximately like:

• ku-LHYEH-moosh

That is only an approximation, but it helps.

Also, in European Portuguese, unstressed vowels are often reduced, so the word may sound less fully pronounced than an English speaker expects.

Yes. Colher is the normal verb for picking or harvesting fruit, vegetables, flowers, and similar things from plants.

So colher tomates, colher maçãs, and colher flores all sound natural.

It is not the usual verb for picking up an object from the floor, for example. For that, Portuguese would more likely use verbs such as apanhar or pegar, depending on the situation.