Comer Conjugation in Portuguese: All Tenses, One Chart

Portuguese comer, not Spanish comer

Same five letters, same meaning, two different verbs. Spanish and Portuguese both spell "to eat" as comer, and in the present tense they look almost identical. Then the past tense shows up and the two languages walk away from each other.

That -eu ending is your fastest tell. Portuguese never produces the Spanish -ió, and the gerund is comendo, never comiendo. Once your ear catches comeu versus comió, the two verbs stop blurring together.

Everything below is Brazilian Portuguese by default, pronunciation hints included, with European Portuguese differences flagged where they change what you say.

The -ER endings chart behind every comer conjugation

Here is why comer earns your attention. It is regular, so it does not teach you one verb, it teaches you a whole class. Chop off the -er and you are holding the stem com-. Bolt the endings below onto that stem and the verb builds itself.

Read every row in pronoun order: eu · tu · ele/ela/você · nós · vós · eles/elas/vocês.

Two structural facts before you go further. The future and conditional never touch the stem: they hang their endings off the complete infinitive, which is why comer plus -ei gives comerei and not comei. And the vós slot is museum furniture, kept for scripture and speeches, so read those forms and never bother producing them.

The wider three-group system these endings sit inside (-ar, -er, -ir) is mapped out in our Portuguese verbs guide.

How do you conjugate comer in the present tense?

The present is where you will spend your first months. It covers habits (I eat rice every day), preferences (I do not eat meat), and ordering lunch.

Three pronoun facts that catch beginners out.

Você takes the ele form. It means "you" but it borrows third-person verbs, so it is você come, never você comes. In Brazil, você is the everyday "you". In Portugal, tu does that job and você can land as stiff or distant.

A gente means "we" and takes the singular. A gente come is far more common in Brazilian speech than nós comemos, and it stays in the ele slot no matter what. The pattern is documented on Wikipedia's Portuguese pronouns page.

Drop the pronoun whenever you like. Como pouco de manhã already means "I eat little in the morning", because that -o ending can only belong to eu. Train your ear on the endings, not the pronouns.

Comer preterite and comer imperfect: the two past tenses

Portuguese splits the past in two. The pretérito perfeito reports a finished action. The imperfeito describes what used to happen or what was going on in the background.

Comer preterite (comi)

You read the nós row correctly: comemos is both "we eat" and "we ate". Every regular -ER verb carries this twin, and Portuguese simply lets context handle it. Spanish keeps them apart (comemos versus comimos); Portuguese does not bother. Add a time word when it matters: comemos agora (we are eating now) against comemos ontem (we ate yesterday).

Comer imperfect (comia)

Rough rule that will carry you a long way: comi for "that happened", comia for "that is how things were". Comi feijoada names one meal. Comia feijoada aos sábados describes a routine.

Portuguese also keeps a one-word pluperfect, comera ("I had eaten"), which now survives mostly in novels and journalism. In speech people build it with ter instead: eu tinha comido. Learn to recognise comera; produce tinha comido.

Comer future and conditional: comerei and comeria

These two tenses leave the stem alone entirely. You take the whole infinitive, comer, and add the ending, which means you can build both straight from the dictionary form.

Future (comerei)

One honest warning: Brazilians rarely say comerei out loud. Everyday future is vou comer ("I am going to eat"), built from ir plus the infinitive. Keep comerei for writing and formal speech and you will sound like a person rather than a textbook.

Conditional (comeria)

Watch the near-collision here. Comia is the imperfect ("I used to eat") and comeria is the conditional ("I would eat"). One extra syllable, completely different meaning. The conditional keeps the full infinitive inside it, so if you hear comer- at the front, you are in conditional territory.

If that açaí example made you hesitate, that vowel pile-up gets its own açaí pronunciation lesson.

Comer subjunctive and imperative: coma, comesse, come

Portuguese uses the subjunctive far more than English does, and it keeps three of them. You do not need to produce all three this week, but you will hear them daily.

Present subjunctive (coma)

Triggered by wishes, doubts and requests: espero que (I hope that), quero que (I want that), talvez (maybe).

Notice the vowel flip. The present indicative ends in -e and -em; the present subjunctive swaps to -a and -am. Every regular -ER verb performs the same swap, so this is one rule, not one verb.

Imperfect subjunctive (comesse)

The "if" tense. It pairs with the conditional to build hypotheticals.

Future subjunctive (comer)

This one has no English equivalent, Spanish has all but retired it, and Portuguese uses it every single day. It follows quando (when), se (if) and assim que (as soon as) whenever you are talking about something still ahead.

For a regular verb the future subjunctive is spelled exactly like the infinitive, so comer stays comer. That shortcut breaks the moment a verb is irregular: poder gives puder (quando eu puder, "when I can"), and the whole set is laid out in our poder conjugation lesson.

Imperative: come or coma?

The textbook rule is clean: tu takes come, você takes coma. Real Brazil bends it. Even when speaking to a você, Brazilians commonly reach for the tu-shaped command, so a parent says Come tudo! rather than Coma tudo!. Coma sounds correct and slightly formal; come sounds like family.

One rule does not bend. Every negative command uses the subjunctive: não comas, não coma, não comam. And Comamos! is grammatically perfect but rare in speech, where Vamos comer! does the job.

Comer, comido, comendo: the forms that build everything else

Personal infinitive (comermos)

Portuguese does something almost no other language does: it conjugates the infinitive. When an infinitive needs a subject of its own, it takes a personal ending.

For a regular verb these forms are identical to the future subjunctive, which feels like a trick until you learn to read the trigger word. Quando, se and assim que pull the future subjunctive. Para, antes de, depois de and "É + adjective" pull the personal infinitive.

Participle and gerund

The past participle is comido (koh-MEE-doo) and the gerund is comendo (koh-MEN-doo). Between them they assemble every compound structure you will actually say.

Three notes on that table. European Portuguese builds the progressive as estou a comer instead of estou comendo, and both are fully correct at home. The participle agrees like an adjective in the passive: a pizza foi comida, os bolos foram comidos. And tenho comido does not mean "I have eaten" as a one-off event; it means "I have been eating" repeatedly or lately. For a single finished meal you want the preterite: eu comi.

Six more -ER verbs you can now conjugate

This is comer's real gift. The chart above is not one verb, it is a template. Swap the stem and every tense lands correctly.

Five of those six are regular from top to bottom, each one checked against Wiktionary's Portuguese conjugation tables. Escrever is the honest exception. Every tense follows the pattern exactly, but the past participle is escrito, not the escrevido you would predict. So it is tenho escrito uma carta, never tenho escrevido. Learn that single word and escrever falls back into line.

Test the template right now with beber. Present: bebo, bebes, bebe, bebemos, bebem. Preterite: bebi, bebeste, bebeu, bebemos, beberam. Future: beberei. Subjunctive: beba. You memorised none of that, you derived it.

A small spelling wrinkle, not an irregularity: verbs ending in -cer, like conhecer (to know) and esquecer (to forget), swap the c for a ç in front of the -a and -o endings so the soft sound survives. That gives eu conheço and que ele esqueça. The endings are still the comer endings underneath.

The -ER verbs that refuse to cooperate

Portuguese hides most of its irregularity inside a short list of very common -ER verbs. These do not follow the chart: ser (to be), ter (to have), fazer (to do), poder (can), querer (to want), saber (to know), ver (to see), dizer (to say), trazer (to bring), haver (there to be) and ler (to read).

That list reads as bad news until you count it. Eleven verbs. Everything else ending in -er is very likely regular, so your default assumption can safely be "it behaves like comer".

Comer at the table: sentences you will actually use

Conjugation sticks when it is attached to something you want. Here is comer doing its day job.

Two fixed expressions earn their place in a beginner's notebook. Comer fora is to eat out at a restaurant, and dar de comer is how you feed an animal or a small child, literally "to give to eat". Priberam's dictionary entry adds comer e calar, roughly "put up with it and say nothing".

The meal words to hang these sentences on are café da manhã (breakfast), almoço (lunch) and jantar (dinner). Portugal swaps the first one for pequeno-almoço. Dishes, drinks, fruit and market vocabulary all live in our food in Portuguese lesson.

One heads-up before you practise on real people. In Brazilian slang, comer followed directly by a person carries a vulgar sexual meaning, a sense listed by both Priberam and Wiktionary. Say jantei com a Ana (I had dinner with Ana) rather than putting Ana straight after the verb. Food objects are safe: comi um pastel raises nobody's eyebrows.

That is the full comer conjugation, from como to comerdes. Chant the present, get comfortable with comi and comia, then go collect the other regular -ER verbs for free. The rest of our free lessons are on the Portuguese hub.