Lesson 5: Reflexive Verbs

5.1

What are Reflexives?

Reflexive verbs – actions where the effect of the action falls back onto the subject or do‑er of the action – are a common challenge for learners. Have no fear though, these work like everything else you have learned up to this point, and they even have handy pronouns built in to help keep track of who’s doing what.

Let’s see a quick example. We can start with a verb we know well, hablar:

You will likely see the most common reflexive verbs’ infinitives written infinitive+se, like hablarse. Now we’re ready to see how to form them.

5.2

Let’s look at the general formation of reflexive verbs.

1. Remove the reflexive pronoun from the infinitive and put it in front. Se is sort of a placeholder here in the infinitive, so don’t worry–we’ll deal with it in due time.

2. Conjugate the verb as normal according to the subject pronoun. The reflexive formation works with any tense or mood. 

3. Choose the correct reflexive pronoun in the table below to match the subject pronoun. Remember, they need to match!

Take a look at the translations here; they all work a little differently! Yo me baño gives us a pretty direct translation to English: I bathe myself. Lots of verbs related to one’s daily routine work this way. But aburrirse and comerse work a little differently:

A lot of the Spanish reflexive verbs translate to English phrasal verbs with get, and many other verbs, like comer, while not literally reflexive, can use the reflexive form to increase the intensity of the action being done.

This is a pretty simple explanation–just enough to get you practicing. You will see more examples as you study with VerbMaster.

5.4

Reflexives in Action

For the reflexive example sentences, we will show you reflexive forms of the verb compared to their non-reflexive forms to highlight how simple they can be.