levar — to take / carry

How to use levar in Brazilian Portuguese

Levar is the Brazilian Portuguese verb for to take / carry. It is a regular -ar verb, so once you know the endings there are no surprises.

Three tenses do almost all the work in conversation. The presente covers the present and the near future: eu levo — I take / carry. The pretérito perfeito is the finished past, the English simple past: eu levei — I took / carried. The pretérito imperfeito is for habits, background and how things used to be: eu levava — I used to take / carry / was taking. Because levar 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 leve — that I take / carry — and the imperfeito do subjuntivo, the tense of hypotheticals: eu levasse — if I took / carried.

Said the Rio way, levo sounds like LEH-voo. The nós form levamos ends in the carioca “sh”, leh-VAH-moosh — the most recognisable sound of the Rio accent, where São Paulo says a plain s.