I remember feeling very decepcionado when I heard people saying "te" almost the same as you. I was working on perfecting the pronunciation of the word "você" -- Was it vo-say or vo-sey? I was hearing people saying things like "Te falei..." and, "Vou te ligar". These are known as, object pronouns.
Is te always a substitute for você?
Não é!
It can only be used in place of você in certain ways. If you are taking the Semantica video course, then you are already seeing how the te enters into the conversation and makes it flow so nicely.
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Let's look at some examples. See if you can just get the way this works. Technically what's happening in these examples is we are replacing você with te when it's receiving the impact of an action. The te is what's called an object pronoun (there are 2 types of object pronouns actually: direct & indirect) in Brazilian Portuguese. Pronouns are just words that can stand in for names and nouns. But never mind all that - just try and understand how this works by examples.
Using TE for você
You can't for example say, "Te vai ao supermercado hoje?" That's because you (você) in this case is not receiving the action of the verb. It must be receiving the action.
"Te ligo..." on the other hand here the te (você) is receiving the action.
But enough of these rules. You can get the hang of it if you just start trying to use it. Like this:
Make sense?
Some super simple examples:
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