o, a, os, as

A Brazilian friend read one of my messages back to me on a call last year, doing this stiff formal voice. The line was "Comprei o ingresso e não o encontrei depois." Nothing wrong with it. She said it sounded like a police report, then gave me her version: "Comprei o ingresso e depois não achei." The pronoun was just gone.

I'd been putting o, a, os, as into everything, because that's what my materials handed me for "it" and "him" and "her," and I was quietly proud of getting the gender right every time. Almost nobody says them out loud. They live in newspapers and contracts and novels. Dropping one into a WhatsApp message just sounds over-educated.

The part that took me longest is that there are two different answers depending on what you're talking about.

If it's a thing, you leave it out. "Comprei o carregador ontem. Deixei em cima da mesa." There's no "it" anywhere in that second sentence, and putting one back in sounds odd rather than clearer. If it's a person, you don't drop it, you use the subject pronoun instead. Vi ele. Encontrei ela no shopping. Which isn't allowed by the grammar books, since ele is a subject form, and everyone says it constantly anyway.

That split is invisible coming from English, because English makes you say "it" either way. "I bought the charger and left on the table" is just broken. So the slot never feels optional, and you fill it with the one form you've been drilled on, which happens to be the bookish one.

I'd been sending voice notes back and forth with someone on HelloTalk who works at a school in Belo Horizonte, and after a few months I started hearing the gaps. What fixed it was volume, mostly. She told me a long story once about her sister, and the sister was ela all the way through. Then she got onto a bag the sister had lost, and there was no object anywhere after that.

This is Brazilian Portuguese as far as I know. In Portugal vi-o is apparently normal in ordinary conversation, and vi ele is the one that sounds off.