Querer Conjugation in Portuguese: Quero, Quis, Queria and the Rest

Querer conjugation in the present tense: quero, quer, queremos, querem

Portuguese and Spanish both spell this verb querer and both use it for "to want," but the conjugations part ways immediately. Portuguese keeps a plain e where Spanish grows an ie: you say quero, never quiero. Here's the present indicative, the tense that covers most of what you'll ever do with this verb.

The stressed vowel in quero, queres, quer and querem is open, like the e in "bet" (/ˈkɛ.ɾu/ for quero, in Brazil and Portugal alike). In queremos the stress moves and the vowel closes to the e in "they." Read the five forms aloud and you'll hear the pattern: four open, one closed.

Does tu take quer or queres?

This is the single most confusing corner of the querer conjugation, so here's the honest answer.

Standard grammar is unambiguous: tu takes queres. That's what conjugation tables print, what exams mark correct, and what you'll hear all day in Portugal, where tu is the normal way to speak to a friend.

Brazil works differently. Most Brazilians address a friend as você, and você takes third-person verbs, so the everyday form is você quer. In the regions that do keep tu (much of the Northeast, Rio, the far South), speakers overwhelmingly attach the third-person form to it anyway: tu quer. Grammar books file that under non-standard. It is still what people say, and what you'll read in messages. Write queres, expect quer.

Two more habits worth packing. A gente replaces nós in casual Brazilian speech and takes a singular verb, so a gente quer sair does the job of nós queremos sair. And European Portuguese turns that final -s into a soft "sh," so queres lands closer to "KEH-resh" in Lisbon than in São Paulo.

Querer preterite: the quis stem that catches everyone out

The pretérito perfeito is where querer stops being guessable. The stem sheds its -er- and becomes quis-, with an s that sounds like a z between vowels. This is the biggest single jump in the whole verb.

Notice that eu and ele share one form, quis. Portuguese does this in several irregular preterites, and nothing but context tells them apart, so keep the pronoun in whenever the sentence could go either way.

Learning quis- is the best deal in this verb. Four other tenses are built from exactly that stem, which means one memory job unlocks all of them:

One meaning trap before you move on. Negated in the preterite, querer usually reports a refusal rather than an absence of desire: pedi ajuda, mas ele não quis says he wouldn't help, not that helping never occurred to him. The same form also covers "didn't mean to": desculpa, não quis te assustar is "sorry, I didn't mean to scare you." Tone and context sort the two out.

Queria: the polite way to want something in Portuguese

Here's the most useful thing on this page. In Portuguese, the imperfect queria is the standard way to order, request and ask for things politely. Queria um café means "I'd like a coffee," not "I was wanting a coffee." Grammars call this the imperfeito de cortesia, the courtesy imperfect, and it separates sounding like a customer from sounding like a demand.

The imperfect still does its ordinary past job too, as in ele queria ser médico. Which reading you get depends on whether you're telling a story or standing at a counter, and native speakers never confuse the two.

Quero or queria? The whole answer in one table

Why does a past tense make you polite? Because it puts the wish at a distance in time, and that distance reads socially: you're describing a want rather than issuing one, which leaves the other person room to say no. Portugal's Ciberdúvidas language service documents the same softening effect for poder and gostar, and querer behaves identically.

Both Brazil and Portugal use queria this way, every day. If you take one form from this entire querer conjugation, take this one, then go practice it on the drinks and dishes in our food in Portuguese lesson.

Querer conjugation in the future and conditional

Good news after the preterite: both of these are completely regular. Keep the whole infinitive querer and bolt the standard endings onto it. They're also the two tenses you'll say least, because spoken Portuguese reaches for vou querer and queria instead.

Futuro do presente

Futuro do pretérito (the conditional)

Say quereria out loud twice and you'll understand why nobody bothers. Five syllables and two rolling r sounds, when queria does the same work in three. That's the real reason these two tables stay mostly on paper: vou querer covers the future in conversation and queria covers the conditional.

The forms you'll only meet in books

Two leftovers, so your chart is complete. The simple pluperfect quisera means "had wanted" and survives mainly in novels and poetry; everyday Portuguese says tinha querido. And the vós forms below belong to old texts, church language and a handful of villages in northern Portugal.

The participle is querido and the gerund is querendo, both perfectly regular. Compound tenses just add ter (or haver, in formal writing): tenho querido is "I have wanted," tinha querido is "I had wanted." You can check any form against Wiktionary's Portuguese querer entry.

Querer subjunctive: queira, quisesse and quiser

Portuguese has three subjunctive tenses and genuinely uses all three. The present queira follows wishes and doubts, the imperfect quisesse handles hypotheticals, and the future quiser turns up in ordinary conversation, because Portuguese kept a future subjunctive that Spanish quietly retired.

Presente do subjuntivo

Watch the stem: queir-, not quer-. That extra i is the whole irregularity, and it's also where a useful politeness formula comes from. Queira plus an infinitive means roughly "kindly": queira aguardar (please wait), queira sentar-se (please have a seat). It's the imperative for você as well, which is why the only command form of querer you'll realistically use sounds like an invitation rather than an order.

Imperfeito do subjuntivo

Futuro do subjuntivo

Learn se quiser and quando quiser as fixed phrases and the future subjunctive is handled for months. The contrast with the plain present is worth a second: se você quer café, tem café na cozinha states a fact about right now, while se você quiser, eu faço café points at a future possibility. The second one is what you usually mean when you offer something.

How to use querer in a sentence

Two patterns carry nearly all real use of this verb, and the second one is a main doorway into the Portuguese subjunctive.

Querer + infinitive: one person, one wish

When the wanter and the doer are the same person, querer takes a bare infinitive. No preposition, no que, nothing in between.

Querer que + subjunctive: two people, two verbs

Change the actor and the grammar changes with it. Querer que is one of the most reliable subjunctive triggers in Portuguese, and the verb after que has to be subjunctive.

English disguises this with an infinitive ("I want you to come"), so learners reach for quero você vir, which no Portuguese speaker says. The rule fits in one line: two different subjects, use que plus a subjunctive. And look at the last row, because it hides a second rule: when querer moves into the past, the subjunctive after it moves to the imperfect too (queria que... ficássemos).

Three mistakes to skip

The personal infinitive

Portuguese kept something no other major Romance language has: an infinitive that takes personal endings. It shows up after prepositions and in impersonal expressions, whenever the subject of the infinitive needs to be spelled out.

The endings are the same ones you already met in the future subjunctive, minus the quis- stem. If quiseres and quisermos feel familiar, quereres and querermos will land in about a minute.

Querer bem: when querer means love

Portuguese runs affection through this verb in a way English doesn't. Querer bem a alguém means to love someone, to hold them dear. Priberam, one of the standard dictionaries of the language, glosses the expression in a single word: amar. Its mirror image, querer mal, is defined just as bluntly as odiar.

That last conjunction catches people out, because it looks exactly like the third-person verb. If you see quer twice in one sentence with a comma between the halves, it isn't wanting anything: it's "whether... or."

And then there's the participle you already know without knowing it. Querido is the past participle of querer, and it's also the word at the top of a letter (Querida Ana is "Dear Ana") and the one partners use for each other (meu querido, my darling). A verb about wanting quietly became the warmest adjective in the language.

That's the complete querer conjugation, from quero to quiserem. Chant the present five, learn queria before you ever learn quererei, and let quis- carry the past. When you want the next irregular, poder conjugation follows the same map, comer conjugation shows what a well-behaved -er verb looks like, and our Portuguese verbs guide lays out the rest of the system.