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​Reflexive verbs In Spanish

What is a reflexive verb in Spanish?

In simple terms, reflexive verbs in Spanish are used when a person performs an action on, for, or to themself.

For example, I wake (myself) up, he gets (himself) dressed, she showered (herself), and so on.

In other words, both the subject and the indirect object of a reflexive verb are the same person or thing.

This means that the subject pronouns (yo, tú, él, ella, usted, nosotros, nosotras, vosotros, vosotras, ellos, ellas, ustedes) will always be affected by the action, and will match the reflexive pronouns (me, te, se, nos, os, se). We’ll go into more detail on the reflexive pronouns below.

How do you identify a reflexive verb?

As we’ll cover later in this post, reflexive verbs come in many forms.

We can identify reflexive verbs by their verb endings in the infinitive verb form: Spanish reflexive verbs always end in se, which is the neutral reflexive pronoun. Examples are conocerse (to know each other), llamarse (to call oneself), or maquillarse (to put makeup on oneself).

Before we see our first list of reflexive verbs in Spanish, however, we need to take a slight detour to review the reflexive pronouns.

What is a reflexive pronoun?

The reflexive pronoun is key to identifying reflexive verbs. All Spanish reflexive verbs require a reflexive pronoun; otherwise they’re not reflexive verbs!

In many cases the verb will mean something else if it doesn’t have a reflexive pronoun. Sometimes it won’t even make any sense at all!

Let’s take the verb bañar, which means to bathe. In its reflexive form we add the reflexive pronoun se: bañarse becomes a reflexive verb meaning to bathe oneself.

We’ll cover more verbs like this later. For now, let’s focus on each reflexive pronoun and how to use them.

What are the six reflexive pronouns in Spanish?

There are actually only five reflexive pronouns in Spanish that you need to learn, since se is the same third-person pronoun for both singular and plural. Here we present all the reflexive pronouns Spanish uses, organized by grammatical person.

Reflexive pronouns, Spanish	Singular	Plural
First-person	me	nos
Second-person	te (se)	os (se)
Third-person	se	se

Where to place reflexive pronouns in a sentence

Reflexive pronouns are typically placed before conjugated verbs or attached to an infinitive.

• Tú te afeitas todas las semanas. – You shave (yourself) every week.

• Yo me despierto a las 6 de la mañana. – I wake (myself) up at 6am.