conseguir — to manage, to succeed

How to use conseguir in Brazilian Portuguese

Conseguir is the Brazilian Portuguese verb for to manage, to succeed. It is an irregular verb: 1 of its forms in the three tenses below break the regular -ir pattern (consigo), and those are the ones to learn by heart.

Three tenses do almost all the work in conversation. The presente covers the present and the near future: eu consigo — I manage. The pretérito perfeito is the finished past, the English simple past: eu consegui — I managed / got. The pretérito imperfeito is for habits, background and how things used to be: eu conseguia — I used to manage / achieve / was managing. Because conseguir 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 consiga — that I manage — and the imperfeito do subjuntivo, the tense of hypotheticals: eu conseguisse — if I managed (to).

Said the Rio way, consigo sounds like kohn-SEE-goo. The nós form conseguimos ends in the carioca “sh”, kohn-seh-GHEE-moosh — the most recognisable sound of the Rio accent, where São Paulo says a plain s.