Portuguese forecasts and notices: vai chover, será and estará

Level A2

Portuguese forecasts and notices: vai chover, será and estará

A forecast and a workplace notice can both tell you about tomorrow. Use ir + an infinitive for your own everyday message, and use a few useful forms such as será, estará and trabalharei when a more written style fits. You will read two notices and pass on their details without changing the information.

Start with a familiar plan

“Vou trabalhar amanhã.” means “I'm going to work tomorrow”: vou is the I-form of ir, trabalhar means “to work” and amanhã means “tomorrow”. Before another verb, vou does not describe a journey here; it helps express the future. Keep that next verb in its infinitive form, trabalhar. With você or one named person, use vai instead of vou; in a weather forecast, you will also use vai.

Words for the forecast and the notices

Chover means “to rain”; reunião means “meeting”, biblioteca means “library”, and fechado means “closed”. Reunião and biblioteca are feminine: a reunião, a biblioteca, with a meaning “the”; fechada agrees with biblioteca. Dez is “ten”, and às dez means “at ten o'clock”. Hoje means “today”, unlike amanhã, “tomorrow”. Hear the cards, then keep these words beside you for the notices.

Say what the forecast predicts

“Vai chover amanhã.” means “It's going to rain tomorrow”. In this weather use, Portuguese has no subject corresponding to English it: do not add ele. Chover stays in the infinitive after vai, and the weather expression uses singular vai. Put não (“not”) before vai to reverse the prediction: “Não vai chover amanhã.” This is a forecast, not a promise that the weather cannot change.

(não) vai chover amanhã / hoje

Read the day, time and closure

Read these as two separate workplace notices: “A reunião será amanhã às dez.” means “The meeting will be tomorrow at ten”; “A biblioteca estará fechada amanhã.” means “The library will be closed tomorrow”. Será is a future form of ser, used here to give the time of an event; estará is a future form of estar, used here for a state. English will be covers both, so choose by the message rather than translating be into one Portuguese verb every time. Here será corresponds to vai ser and estará to vai estar; the one-word forms suit a written notice, but are also possible in speech. The closure tells you not to plan a library visit tomorrow; neither notice tells you where the meeting is. Practise these useful forms without learning a whole conjugation chart.

One plan, two ways to say it

“Vou trabalhar amanhã.” and “Trabalharei amanhã.” can describe the same plan: “I'm going to work tomorrow” / “I will work tomorrow”. Trabalharei is the future form of trabalhar for I; compare the infinitive trabalhar with trabalhar + ei. In everyday Brazilian conversation, vou trabalhar is a natural first choice; trabalharei can give the message a more formal or written tone. This is not a near-future versus distant-future rule: either can refer to tomorrow. Try saying or writing trabalharei once, then choose vou trabalhar for your own casual message; you do not need the other persons yet.

vou trabalhar / trabalharei amanhã.

Read a notice, then say it in conversation

Speaker A reads the two notices aloud, one at a time; B restates each in everyday language. Listen to será become vai ser and estará become vai estar, with tomorrow, ten and the closure unchanged. The informal label marks this everyday phrasing; vai + infinitive can also appear in formal situations. B adds no place for the meeting and no reason for the closure.

Pass on the useful details

Before opening the examples, tell a colleague in Portuguese that the forecast predicts rain tomorrow, that the meeting is tomorrow at ten, and that the library will be closed tomorrow. Prefer vai chover, vai ser and vai estar for this conversational message; then compare your three sentences with the examples in that order. As a new task, change only amanhã to hoje to report the same information for later today: for example, “Vai chover hoje.” Keep the time and the closure, and do not invent a meeting place. Finally write the two notices with será and estará, and write your own work plan once with vou trabalhar and once with trabalharei. The key is to preserve the information while choosing a suitable way to express the future.

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