Reﬂexive verbs – LEARN TO SPEAK GERMAN

What are reflexive verbs?

Reﬂexive verbs refer to an action where the subject of a sentence is doing something to itself:

Ich habe mich verletzt.

I have hurt myself.

Marco amüsiert sich.

Marco enjoys himself.

Reﬂexive verbs are always used with a reﬂexive pronoun (mich, sich etc.) which reﬂects the action back to the subject of the sentence.

Two types of reflexive verbs

There are two main types of reﬂexive verbs in German:

• ‘true’ reﬂexive verbs such as sich bedanken ‘to say thank you’, sich verabschieden ‘to say goodbye’, which can only be used reﬂexively; and
• a large group of verbs, which are usually used in a non-reﬂexive way but can also function reﬂexively:

Non-reﬂexive Reﬂexive

Ich wasche das Asuto. ® Ich wasche mich.

I wash the car. I wash myself./I have a wash.

Both types of reﬂexive verbs are usually used with an accusative pronoun (mich etc.) but can also be accompanied by a dative reﬂexive pronoun (mir etc.).

Reflexive pronouns in the accusative and dative

Here is an overview of the reﬂexive pronouns in the accusative and dative:

Accusative	Dative		Accusative	Dative
mich	mir	myself	uns	uns	ourselves
dich	dir	yourself (inf.)	euch	euch	yourselves (inf.)
sich sich	sich sich	yourself (form.) himself/itself	sich	sich	yourselves (form.)
sich	sich	herself/itself	sich	sich	themselves
sich	sich	itself

Note that only the ich and du forms of the accusative and dative differ (mich/mir and dich/dir).

Reflexive verbs + prepositions

A number of reﬂexive verbs are normally used together with a preposi- tion, such as sich erinnern + an or sich interessieren + für:

Sie erinnert sich an ihren ersten Freund.

She remembers her ﬁrst boyfriend.

Interessiert ihr euch für Fußball?

Are you interested in football?

Other examples include: sich ärgern über ‘to be annoyed about’, sich aufregen über ‘to be upset, angry about’, sich beschweren über/bei ‘to complain about/to’, sich freuen auf ‘to look forward to’, sich freuen über ‘to be happy about/with’.

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