Eu
|
I
|
Você
|
You
|
Ele
|
He
|
Ela
|
She
|
-
|
It
|
Nós
|
We
|
Vocês
|
You (plural)
|
Eles
|
They (masculine)
|
Elas
|
They (feminine)
|
As you can see, there's no pronoun in portuguese that works exactly what english's 'it' means. That happens because there's no neutral genre in portuguese. All nouns in portuguese are masculine or feminine, there's no other genre! For example:
Eu tenho um carro. Ele é muito rápido.
I have a car. It is very fast.
Car (carro) in portuguese is a masculine word. So, the correct pronoun to refer to the car is 'Ele'.
Eu tenho uma casa. Ela é grande.
I have a house. It is big.
House (casa) in portuguese is a feminine word. So, the correct pronoun to refer to house is 'Ela'.
It's almost like referring to an object as a person. Strange? Not at all! It happens the same way in spanish, french, italian and other latin-related languages.
Another thing I must say: there are two other pronouns in portuguese (specially Portugal's portuguese and formal portuguese). Those are 'Tu' (You) and 'Vós' (You plural) but we will keep distance from those! And we're gonna do that for one reason: no one uses those in Brazil. It's complicated to conjugate verbs with 'tu' and 'vós', but it's easy to conjugate with 'você' and 'vocês', so let's just forget those two from now on.
You're probably thinking: "how do I pronounce these words". Well, you'd probably enjoy the video below. It's not me in the video, obviously (I'm a man and I'm not so cute). This is the end of our first lesson!
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