Connecting the Dots 🔴⚪️🔵

Prepositions, Verbs, and the Infinite Web of Brazilian Portuguese

You may have noticed that certain verbs in Portuguese don’t like to go it alone. They need a little something between themselves and the next verb in the sentence — a connector. A preposition. And they are very choosy about which one.

Let’s call these what they are: verb-preposition addictions. Some are light dependencies. Others are full-blown compulsions. Either way, if you’re stringing together actions or expressing intention, odds are high that one verb is going to need its favorite preposition in order to connect with the next one.

In this post I want to connect all of the connectors and unlock all the locks — So you understand how & when to use them.

You’ve seen COMEÇAR + a and, PARAR + de ➜ ref: começar a; precisar de
...and know that these have to be followed by a preposition when another verb comes after them. This isn’t a quirky exception. It’s how the whole language works.

And if you’ve read my post on ACABAR de — which explains how this verb flips into “just (did something)” when paired with de — you already know how one tiny preposition can change everything.

Why These Prepositions Matter
When verbs connect in Portuguese — usually via the infinitive form — the preposition is the silent partner that makes the everything work. It's good magic - AND I LOVE IT.

Imagine these without the preposition
Let’s say you take a sentence like

Eu comecei a cozinhar. If you drop the “a” and just say Eu comecei cozinhar. To a native ear, that’s going to sound jarring and clearly incorrect.

Another example would be Eu parei de fumar. ➜ I stopped smoking. Without the preposition de it's Eu parei fumar. . This might not sound wrong to us, but it'd be like saying, "I'm going my girlfriend's house."

Which connector to use and when???
Relaxa! Just watch and listen. Trying to recall the grammar rule (sim, existe!) will slow you down. Spend your time on dialogs and remember: repeating sentences out loud forces your brain to store a little audio snippet. These then get quick-referenced when you're in a conversation. Repetition makes these "recordings" stick.

Others?
Começar wants “a” and parar demands “de.” This is foundational. If you missed my post on the infinitive in Portuguese go read that first. It explains why these verb chains depend on the infinitive form to begin with — and how prepositions glue them together. Other verbs that have their own special connector include:

Parar de (to stop doing)

⸻

Voltar a (to do again)

⸻

Aprender a (to learn to)

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Esquecer de (to forget to)

⸻

Lembrar de (to remember to)

⸻

Gostar de (to like to)

⸻

Verbs with connectors other than de or a?

Pensar em (to think about)

⸻

Acreditar em (to believe in)

⸻

Agradecer por (to thank for)

⸻

Sonhar com (to dream about)

⸻

Sem (without)

How about a reference table?

Portuguese verbs with common connectors

Now see what happens when you try to chain two actions without respecting the preposition:

❌ Ele voltou estudar.
✅ Ele voltou a estudar.

Most native speakers won’t even understand what you were trying to say without that tiny preposition.

More Than One Verb? Sem problema. Just Follow the Chain
This is where things get fun — or murky, depending on how deep you’ve gone with your verb vocabulary.
Let’s look at a chain:
Ela acabou de começar a estudar.
Here we’ve got acabar de (to have just done something) and começar a (to begin to). It means:
➜ She just started studying.
Each verb hooks into the next, with its required preposition. If you missed it, we went deeper into acabar de in this earlier post.

Let’s try another:
Eles esqueceram de tentar parar de fumar.
Boom. Four verbs. All legal. All wired correctly:
esquecer de
tentar (no preposition needed here)
parar de
fumar (the final infinitive)
➜ They forgot to try to stop smoking.
Mind-bending? Kind of. But once you start seeing how prepositions act as bridges — and how each verb’s personality dictates which bridge it wants — it becomes clear.

The Case of DE
Of all the prepositions, “de” is the one you’ll see the most. It’s a chameleon. We covered its behavior in this post — and it deserves every line it got.
It plays nice with:
gostar
precisar
ter vontade
lembrar
esquecer
acabar
Try this one on for size:
Eu acabei de decidir de não sair.
Wait. ❌ Too much de. The second one is wrong.
Correct:
Eu acabei de decidir não sair.
Decidir doesn’t need a preposition before its infinitive. This kind of overcorrection is common — and easy to fix once you memorize the pairings.

Final Notes
I hate to say “you just have to memorize it” but… you kind of do. That’s where practice (and repetition inside stories) saves you. Don’t memorize out of context. See and hear it in the wild — like inside our story episodes.
Use our post on Portuguese prepositions & verbs as a reference and start building your personal preposition + verb deck.
Trust the pairings. Trust the patterns. The Portuguese you’re trying to speak lives inside these chains.
👉 And if you haven’t read it yet: go dive into The Portuguese Infinitive.
It all starts there.

Full Disclosure: Language was never my thing!

Prepositions just doing their thing

xxx in Portuguese : xxx Like this:

What do connectors do?

present the most common: para, de

Prepare for more Prepositions

a, em, sem

The bottom third prepositions

sobre, com, por

This post is about 🧘🏼‍♀️.

✻ Olha Isso:

You've probably seen this before. It seems like "a" gets inserted whenever começar is put next to another verb.

What's so special about xxx
NADA.
None of

Which sounds better:
Vamos this
Vamos that 🙉 🙉 🙉