Conjugating Reflexive Verbs

Spanish has verbs that are reflexive, and English does, too. English uses words like myself, himself, herself, and ourselves to indicate that the person who is acting out a verb is performing the action on himself or herself. Spanish uses words called reflexive pronouns to do the same job. English puts them after a conjugated verb, but Spanish puts them before.

Let's look at an example of a reflexive pronoun that you are already familiar with-and you probably use it quite well without even knowing that it has a reflexive pronoun in it. Let's look at the verb llamarse, which means to call oneself, the verb that we use to tell what people are named.

So when you learned to say, "Cómo te llamas?" and "Me llamo ... " you were really saying "What do you call youself?" and "I call myself ... "

Just as the endings of a verb have to change to match the subject of the sentence, so does the reflexive pronoun. Yo me ducho means that I take a shower (I shower myself), but Yo te ducho means that I shower ... you. Be careful!

Most reflexive verbs paint very clear pictures: bañarse (to bathe oneself), ducharse (to shower oneself), levantarse (to get oneself up), sentarse (to sit oneself, which is different from a server seating you in a restaurant, right?). However, some reflexive verbs don't seem to us, speakers of English, to have any reason to be reflexive, verbs like despertarse (to wake up), casarse con (to get married to), or relajarse (to relax). You will have to memorize those verbs. How do you know that an infinitive is reflexive? Look for the se attached to the end of it in your vocabulary list or dictionary. Reflexive verbs can end in ar, er, and ir, and they can be stem-changing, regular, or irregular, so it is important for you to be familiar with all those kinds of verbs before you move on to the practice.