Portuguese Past Subjunctive (Imperfeito do Conjuntivo)

The Subjunctive mood is often a source of much whining and moaning among Portuguese language learners – so many conjugations one must keep track of! 

We have three tenses within the Subjunctive mood: Past, Present, and Future. Today we are tackling specifically the Past Subjunctive (also known as Imperfect Subjunctive or Imperfeito do Conjuntivo in Portuguese).  

Shortly, we use the Portuguese Past Subjunctive in a host of different situations: from expressing uncertainty, desire, and unreal scenarios, to it being an integral part of subordinate clauses of various kinds.

In what follows, I am going to walk you through each of the different contexts – with concrete examples – in which we use the Past Subjunctive. 

We’ll start by looking into its conjugation.

Related reads!
• Portuguese Present Subjunctive: Conjugation and Usage
• Portuguese Future Subjunctive – Conjugation and Usage

How to conjugate the Portuguese Past Subjunctive

Regular verbs

The conjugation of regular verbs is straightforward and works the same way across our 3 conjugation groups. 

You just need to replace the final r  of the Infinitive form with the endings marked in bold:

Pronunciation tips! Notice how the 1-person plural is always stressed on the third last syllable (otherwise, we stress the second last). Learn more about word stress in Portuguese: Portuguese Word Stress and Accent Marks.

Irregular verbs

For irregular verbs, you go from the 3-person plural of the Preterite tense (Pretérito Perfeito) and replace the -ram ending with the conjugated endings shown in the table above. Here are a few examples:

When to use the Portuguese Past Subjunctive

We use the Portuguese Past Subjunctive to express uncertainty, hypothetically, desire, and unreal scenarios. Besides these, it often appears in subordinate clauses of different sorts.

Below, we’ll look at when to use the Portuguese Past Subjunctive in greater detail.

Impersonal structures