Portuguese

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Falar (to speak) [fa-lár] Present

🔊 In the app, every line has its own play button: the conjugated form is spoken together with its pronoun. So are the infinitive and the example sentence. Speed adjustable from 50% to 150%.

💡 Memory hook
FALAR comes from the Latin "fabulari" (to chat, to tell stories) — that's also where the English word "fable" comes from, a helpful memory hook.

⚠️ Worth knowing
The model verb for regular -AR verbs, the largest group in Portuguese. Watch out for the difference between "falamos" (present) and "falámos" (simple past, with an accent) — a distinction specific to European Portuguese that doesn't show up in most other tenses.

💬 Example sentence
Presente: Falo português. (I speak Portuguese.)

• In Portuguese, the subject pronoun is often dropped: the verb ending is enough to show who's speaking - even more often than in Spanish.
• Written accents can change the meaning or tense of a word: for example, in European Portuguese, “falamos” (we speak, present) and “falámos” (we spoke, past) are spelled differently - pay attention to the accent mark.
• The pronoun “vós” (you all, formal) is a literary/archaic form, very rare in everyday spoken European Portuguese. In daily life, “vocês” is used to address a group - that's the form you'll actually hear.
• Portuguese has several nasal sounds that don't exist in English, marked by “ã” or “õ”, or by an m/n after a vowel (as in “não”, “bem”, “som”) - air passes through the nose while you pronounce the vowel. Listening to native audio is the best way to get your ear used to them.
• Portuguese has a unique grammatical feature called the personal infinitive: the infinitive itself can take person endings (falar → falares, falarmos...), something neither English nor Spanish do. You'll mostly meet it after “para” (“para eles falarem”) - don't worry, it's rarely needed for basic conversation.
• The Portuguese present perfect (tenho falado) doesn't work like the English one: it's not used for a single completed action, but for something repeated or ongoing recently (“tenho estudado muito” = “I've been studying a lot lately”, not “I have studied”). For a single past event, Portuguese uses the simple past instead (falei = I spoke).