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Pronouns

The subject pronouns are mostly optional — the verb ending already says who. Saying eu out loud is emphatic.

The você problem

This is the hardest thing about Portuguese pronouns, and the two sides of the Atlantic have opposite answers.

• In Brazil, você is simply "you". It is what everyone says to everyone, and tu survives only regionally.
• In Portugal, você can sound cold or presumptuous. The familiar form is tu; the polite move is to use no pronoun at all and let the third-person verb do the work, or to say o senhor / a senhora.

Quer um café? — "Would you like a coffee?" with no pronoun anywhere — is the safest polite sentence in European Portuguese.

Object pronouns, and where they go

Portugal attaches them to the end of the verb with a hyphen: chamo-me, dá-me, vejo-o. Brazil puts them in front: me chamo, me dá. It is the single most visible difference between the two in writing.

But even in Portugal they jump to the front after a negative, a question word, or certain adverbs:

• Chamo-me Ana. → Não me chamo Ana.
• Dá-me o livro. → Quem me dá o livro?

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