Using the Verbs Ser and Estar in Portuguese: A Difficult Task for Non Native Learners*

AbstractThe main purpose of this paper is to analyse the difficulty of learners of Portuguese to dealwith the verbs SER and ESTAR (‘To Be’), as far as each of them is used to express differentand specific situations. It also aims to help the teachers solving this problem.After an overview of what the most important grammars of Portuguese say about thissubject, the corpus is presented and the data (around 60 examples) are analysed takingaccount of the origin of the learners and also dividing the various examples according todifferent levels of language proficiency.When the various types of language mistakes are identified, the results are explainedand the conclusions lead to the need of teaching SER and ESTAR in a way provides the nonnatives of Portuguese to actually understand the normal use of each of these verbs. Thisintends to avoid students of Portuguese to go on repeating the same errors which will getthem to a future linguistic fossilization.