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Which preposition a verb demands. Where spoken Brazilian and the taught norm part company most often, and most expensively.
The control text · argumentative
Proibir o celular nas escolas parece uma medida drástica, mas os resultados sugerem que ela funciona. Nas redes que adotaram a restrição, os professores relatam menos interrupções e uma queda nos casos de intimidação online. É verdade que o aparelho também é ferramenta de estudo, e seria ingênuo ignorar isso. Ainda assim, o custo da distração recai sobre quem já tem menos apoio em casa. Enquanto não houver evidência de que o uso livre melhora a aprendizagem, o ônus da prova cabe a quem defende a permissão.
Where the two part
Brazilian · the base
Spoken Brazilian drops or swaps prepositions freely. All of the swaps below are stigmatised in writing and all of them are what people say.
European · the contrast
Speech sits closer to the prescriptive norm, so the gap a Brazilian learner has to manage barely exists.
10 options
Assistir ao debate sobre a proibição. — spoken Brazilian: assistir o debate
The tellThe a before the object. Transitive assistir without it means to assist, not to watch.
The textbook example, and one an examiner is actively looking for.
Nobody says it in Brazil, so producing it in speech there sounds like a grammar lesson.
Ir à escola. — spoken Brazilian: ir na escola
The tella for going, em for being. Brazilian speech uses em for both.
Also settles the crase question, since a + a gives à.
Ir na escola is so entrenched in speech that the correction has to be conscious every time.
Chegar a um acordo. — spoken Brazilian: chegar em um acordo
The tellSame a versus em split as ir.
It generalises: motion towards takes a, and that one principle covers several verbs at once.
The exceptions are lexical, so the principle gets you most of the way and not all of it.
Obedecer às regras da escola.
The tellA verb that looks transitive and is not: it takes an indirect object.
A small closed class (obedecer, desobedecer, responder, agradar) worth learning as a list.
Because the class is small, it is pure memorisation with no pattern underneath.
Prefiro a restrição a um sistema sem regras. — not do que
The tella where English and speech both want than.
A precise construction that makes a comparison in an argument look effortless.
Prefiro X do que Y is near-universal in speech, so the correct form reads as bookish outside writing.
Namorar alguém. — spoken Brazilian: namorar com alguém
The tellA verb that looks like it needs a preposition and does not.
The mirror image of obedecer, and useful precisely because it runs the other way.
It is a small point that carries no meaning, which makes it hard to care about and easy to lose.
A proibição implica uma mudança de rotina. — not implica em
The tellNo em, despite everyone adding one.
It appears constantly in argumentative writing, so the payoff per unit of memorisation is high.
Implicar em is so common in Brazilian professional prose that the correct form can look like the error.
A medida visa a reduzir interrupções. — also accepted: visa reduzir
The tellTwo governments coexist in the standard, depending on the sense.
Honest complexity: not every regência question has one right answer, and knowing which ones are open is itself knowledge.
Because both are defensible, it is a poor thing to be confident about in either direction.
Cheguei em casa · fui na escola · assisti o jogo
The tellAny of the above, said out loud, by anyone in Brazil.
It is the actual spoken system, and treating it as error rather than as a register is both wrong and useless.
Every instance is marked in writing, and marked hard, in both exams.
Vi o debate. · Fui para a escola. · A medida reduz interrupções.
The tellA different verb, or no preposition needed at all.
Always correct, always available, and in argumentative writing it usually produces a tighter sentence anyway.
It narrows your range, and used systematically it is visible as avoidance.