chegar — to arrive

How to use chegar in Brazilian Portuguese

Chegar is the Brazilian Portuguese verb for to arrive. It is a regular -ar verb, so once you know the endings there are no surprises — only the spelling shifts in cheguei to keep the sound of the stem, which is orthography, not irregularity.

Three tenses do almost all the work in conversation. The presente covers the present and the near future: eu chego — I arrive. The pretérito perfeito is the finished past, the English simple past: eu cheguei — I arrived. The pretérito imperfeito is for habits, background and how things used to be: eu chegava — I used to arrive / was arriving. Because chegar is one of the 58 most-used verbs, the page also has both subjunctives: the presente do subjuntivo, the mood of wishes, doubts and “quero que…” — eu chegue — that I arrive — and the imperfeito do subjuntivo, the tense of hypotheticals: eu chegasse — if I arrived.

Said the Rio way, chego sounds like SHEH-goo. The nós form chegamos ends in the carioca “sh”, sheh-GAH-moosh — the most recognisable sound of the Rio accent, where São Paulo says a plain s.