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In this lesson we are going to learn about the reflexive verbs. Now let's look at how these types of sentences would work in English before we proceed. You'll remember that from the vocabulary list we saw some pronouns that meant myself, himself, herself, ourselves, etc. These are what we call reflexive pronouns and when used with a verb show that we can do the action to ourselves, or someone else can do it to themselves.
For example, if we take the verb to bathe we can form the sentence in English I bathe myself. By adding the pronoun myself we show that someone else didn't bathe me, but that I bathed me.
Identifying the reflexive verbs is quite simple. If you see the se at the end of an infinitive that means the verb is reflexive. Like the ones we saw in the vocabulary list - bañarse, levantarse, etc.
What the se means is that when we conjugate the verb we simply need to use one of the reflexive pronouns to show the reflexive action of the verb. Let's review the pronouns in Spanish and the see how these verbs work.
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| me | (myself) | nos (ourselves) | |
| te | (yourself) | ||
| se | (yourself,herself, himself, itself) |
se (yourselves, themselves) | |
When we conjugate these verbs we need to remember a couple of things. First. we need to make the pronouns agree with the subject of the sentence. For example, the pronoun me would go with yo and the pronoun nos would go with nosotros. The subject would come first followed by the reflexive pronoun to give us yo me, and then the conjugated verb would follow.
We need to say something about the verb itself now. Since we are still talking about present tense forms of the verb, all reflexives in this lesson will take the endings of the ar, er, and ir verbs we have learned already. We also need to remember that stem changing still applies to verbs of this type. These verbs were indicated in the vocabulary list with the parentheses.
Having taken into account the subjects and pronouns, let's see what a conjugated reflexive verb looks like. The verb is bañarse:
Singular Plural yo me baño (I bathe myself) nosotros nos bañamos (we bathe ourselves) tú te bañas (you bathe yourself) usted se baña (you bathe yourself)
ella se baña (she bathes herself)
él se baña (he bathes himself)
Pablo se baña (Paul bathes himself)ustedes se bañan (you all bathe yourselves)
ellas se bañan (they bathe themselves)
ellos se bañan (they bathe themselves)
María y Pablo se bañan (Mary and Paul bathe themselves)
By simply saying yo me baño, now we have formed a complete logical sentence I bathe myself.
The reflexive verbs are used often to describe what you and other people would do on a typical day. So the exercises in this lesson will be to practice phrases like that. A simple formula can help us once again, subject + reflexive pronoun + conjugated verb + rest of sentence. For example:
Yo me acuesto a las 11
I go to bed at 11
The exercises have been divided into two parts. The first part will allow you to practice chosing the correct reflexive pronoun. The second part will ask you to give the correct form of the verb.
