Free European Portuguese Verb Conjugation Quiz

How the European Portuguese conjugation quiz works

You set it up in two steps. First tick the tenses you want, from the same 18 as the worksheets. None are ticked when the page opens, and “Tick all” ticks every one. Each tense shows an example in plain English, such as “eu falei · I spoke, I have spoken” for the preterite. Then narrow the 600 verbs, ranked by how often they occur in film and TV subtitles from Portugal, or leave every box empty to keep them all. One group sorts them by how the verb changes: regular (falar → falo, falei), a spelling change only (ficar → fiquei, conhecer → conheço) or irregular (ser, ter, fazer → faço, pôr → ponho). Another sorts them by ending, -ar, -er or -ir, with pôr counted among the -er verbs. The last one picks out the verbs always used with se, such as queixar-se, though there are only four of them. Ticks in one group add up, and groups narrow each other. A group with nothing ticked keeps all its verbs.

Press “Start the quiz” and the quiz asks for one form at a time, such as “nós · falar · preterite”, with the English meaning underneath. Portugal's answer is falámos. Type it and press Enter, or Check, and it's marked at once. A wrong answer shows the correct form, and a running count of right and wrong answers, with a percentage, stays on screen. The quiz has no fixed length, and it asks every question once before any repeats, in a new random order each pass. “Stop and see my score” lists the forms you missed, and “Practice my mistakes” drills just those. Your verb ticks are saved on this device, though the tenses are not.

Portugal's forms: falámos, registar and queixo-me

The quiz expects the Portuguese of Portugal. The -ar preterite keeps the accent Portugal writes: nós falámos means “we spoke”, and nós falamos “we speak”. Verbs keep Portugal's spelling, such as registar and planear. Reflexive pronouns go where Portugal puts them. In a plain statement the pronoun follows the verb, with a hyphen: queixo-me. In the future and the conditional it sits inside the verb: queixar-me-ei, queixar-se-ia. In the perfect tenses it goes on the auxiliary (tenho-me queixado), and after que it comes first (que me queixe). Commands are queixa-te, and in the negative não te queixes. Brazil's eu me queixo is marked wrong here, because Portugal's grammar marks it wrong in a plain statement. If you learn the Portuguese of Brazil, use the Brazilian Portuguese verb conjugation quiz instead.

Accents and hyphens count, capital letters don't

Type “eles tem” when the answer is “eles têm” and the quiz marks it wrong, with the note “Almost: check the accents and hyphens” and the right answer. That's fair, because tem means “he has” and têm means “they have”. A missing hyphen, as in “queixo me”, gets the same note. You don't need a Portuguese keyboard. Buttons on screen type á, â, ã, à, ç, é, ê, í, ó, ô, õ and ú, on a laptop or a phone. Capital letters don't matter, and neither does the subject pronoun: eu falo and falo both count, and so do você fala and vocês falam. Vós is switched off when the page opens, as on the worksheets, because it's rarely used today. Tick “Include vós” to add it.

The 18 tenses, with Portugal's names

All 18 tenses are available, each with the Portuguese name Portugal uses. The indicative has the present (eu falo), preterite (eu falei), imperfect (eu falava), simple pluperfect (eu falara, mostly in writing), future (eu falarei) and conditional, or condicional (eu falaria). The perfect tenses are built with ter: present perfect (eu tenho falado), pluperfect (eu tinha falado), future perfect (eu terei falado) and conditional perfect (eu teria falado). Watch the present perfect. Tenho falado means “I have been speaking lately”, and the English “I have spoken” is the preterite, falei. The subjunctive, or conjuntivo, has the present (que eu fale), imperfect (se eu falasse), future (quando eu falar), perfect (que eu tenha falado) and pluperfect (se eu tivesse falado). Then come the personal infinitive (para nós falarmos) and the commands, affirmative and negative: fala, não fales. You may type que, se or quando before the conjuntivo and para before the personal infinitive, and the não of a negative command is optional. Where Portugal accepts two participles, both count: tinha entregado and tinha entregue. Chove (it rains) takes no pronoun.

How accurate are the forms?

The quiz uses the same tables as the worksheets. The forms come from Wiktionary, sorted into Portugal's forms and Brazil's by Wiktionary's own regional labels. We checked them against LanguageTool's Portuguese dictionary and the verbecc conjugator, and every form against Portugal's spelling dictionary. The European Portuguese worksheet page gives the full results and explains the differences we found.

A quiz for you, a worksheet for the class

The quiz is made for one person at a keyboard or a phone, checking answers as they go. Before a test, tick only the tenses it covers, such as the preterite (falei) and the imperfect (falava), and finish each run with “Practice my mistakes”. For a class, the same verbs and tenses print as European Portuguese verb conjugation worksheets: fill-in boxes, a printed quick quiz and a verb chart, with answer keys on separate pages. To look up one verb, every form of all 600 is in the European Portuguese conjugation tables. And if you learn Spanish or German too, the Spanish and German verb conjugation quizzes work the same way.

Frequently asked questions

Licenses and credits

Conjugation tables come from English Wiktionary through kaikki.org (CC BY-SA 4.0). Verbs are ranked by Hermit Dave's FrequencyWords list, built from OpenSubtitles 2018 (CC BY-SA 4.0).