Speak Brazilian Portuguese - How to talk about where you are.

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In this episode, I'm going to teach you how to answer a very common question:

Where are you? /Onde você está?

We are going to study the conjugation of the verb estar (to be) and the use of the preposition em (in/on/at).

To say where you are, you need to conjugate the verb estar (to be) and use the preposition em (in/on/at) according to the gender of the place where you are.

For example:

Onde você está?

Eu estou no supermercado.

Ou

Eu estou na lavanderia.

The preposition em is neutral, that is, it has no gender, but before masculine or feminine nouns we merge the preposition em with articles a or o, and we then create the prepositions na and no.

As a rule, nouns ending with the letter a are feminine and most of the nouns ending with other letters are masculine.

Nevertheless, there are many exceptions, since very often the gender is related to the origin of the word. In this lesson, we are not going to talk about exceptions and about the origin of words. We are going to focus on the study of the conjugation of the verb estar (to be) and in the most common use of the preposition em (in/at/on).

Let's see some examples:

Eu estou em casa.
Você está na casa da Maria.

Note that in these two examples, I used different variations of the preposition em.

When I say "Eu estou em casa" (I am at home), I mean I'm in my own house, where I live. When I say "Estou na casa", I am referring to a specific house of another person, Maria's house or João's house.

Let's look at other examples:

Ela está no trabalho.
Ele está na academia.
A gente está no parque.
Nós estamos no restaurante.
Vocês estão nos correios.
Elas estão na loja.
Eles estão no shopping.

Note that in these examples, the nouns ending with the letter a are feminine and those ending with other letters are masculine. In the case of the word correios (post office), we have a plural masculine noun, for this reason we use the preposition nos, nos correios.

Listen to this episode at least three times to assimilate content and practice pronunciation.

Thanks for listening to my podcast and see you next time!

Tchau, tchau!