For anyone new, I’m going through Learning Spanish Like Crazy. Almost half way through at lessons 13, 14 and 15, they are going through Reflexive Verbs. There are a lot of comments in the forum about lesson 13. The narrator and the actors change, which isn’t a big deal, but this lesson is the first one I’ve had to read the transcripts to see what’s going on.

First I had to find out what a reflexive verb is. From Wikipedia:

In grammar, a reflexive verb is a verb whose semantic agent and patient (typically represented syntactically by the subject and the direct object) are the same. For example, the English verb to perjure is reflexive, since one can only perjure oneself. In a wider sense, it refers to any verb form whose grammatical object is a reflexive pronoun, regardless of semantics; such verbs are also referred to as pronominal verbs (especially in grammar of Romance languages).

That means a verb that is doing something to a pronoun. You wash yourself, they wash themselves. I shave myself, etc…

This lesson also makes you pay attention. They start out with the verb to wake up: despertarse. That’s fine, but later in the same lesson they tell you how to get up: levantarse. The narrator will go back and forth between wake up and get up and he also uses two different ways to say get dressed.

Just when I was able to get the me levanto (I get up), now they add después de levantarme (after I get up) with the rest of the sentence - yo me afeito la cara. (After I get up, I shave my face). I’m not sure why or when to use levantarme instead of me levanto, but I’m working on it.

Update: I found the answer to why it’s levantarme instead of me levanto:

In Spanish, the infinitive follows a preposition (e.g., después de, antes de, sin).

The sentences are getting longer by putting two verbs in one sentence now and the conversations at the beginning and end seem to be getting faster. There seems to be a lot packed into this one lesson and it joins together with the next two expanding into one giant lesson. Great stuff.

Also in the forums, a lot of people say that LSLC can’t be your only resource for learning. Mainly because there isn’t a lot of explanation about the grammar or why something is done the way it is. This is one of the many books I have and it’s great. It’s small, it’s cheap and packed with information.

13 is the most challenging lesson so far and I’m slowly getting better each time I go through it. I’ve started skipping to about halfway through because I’ve got the first half down pretty good.