Portuguese/Contents/L1/Lesson Six - The Train

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Here Ricardo is buying a ticket on a train station (o comboio in Portugal, "the train", is translated as o trem in Brazil). He also asks some other questions about the train he wants to catch. In this lesson we're going to learn how to make questions in Portuguese. We've already seen one way of asking about things, when we looked at verbs like "gostar".

These are almost exactly the same as stating something.

In fact, the only difference between these sentences is that there is a question mark at the end. In Portuguese, you can ask a yes/no question by just stating something, and putting a question mark at the end of it. In the spoken language, you should pronounce with a raising intonation to the end of the sentence, just like in English. This is an extremely easy way to form a question.

STATEMENT & QUESTION MARK =  YES/NO QUESTION

And how do we answer such questions? Well, of course, with a "Yes" or a "No". When Alberto asks Ricardo:

O senhor tem bilhete?

Ricardo could answer with...

We've also encountered another way to ask questions. Back in lesson three we learnt how to ask someone what they were going to do on a certain day. Do you remember?

O que vai fazer na terça-feira? - What are you going to do on Tuesday?

O que eles vão fazer no domingo? - What are they going to do on Sunday?

The two words 'O que' mean "what?" You can also ask "o que é que...", which literally means "what is it that...".

de:Portugiesisch: Lektionen: Der Zug