Wishes and duties… Sometimes we would like to do something, but we have to do something else. This tension between our intentions and our obligations can be easily expressed in Spanish by using two structures that can be also found in English. You just need to make the transfer into Spanish of what you already know in English, and that’s it!
The trickiest bit with these types of structures is that the infinitive could happen to be a reflexive verb. In that case, you need to ‘activate’ the reflexive bit of the verb. You cannot just ignore it! This would produce sentences such as this one:
Queremos despertarnos a las diez, pero tenemos que despertarnos a las ocho. (Literally: We want to wake up at ten, but we have to wake up at eight).
There is effectively an agreement taking place. In this case, two verbs are involved, one conjugated the other in the infinitive form. When we know who is involved, we make a choice of ending for the conjugated verb of the structure, and if the infinitive is a reflexive verb, we need to change the reflexive pronoun to one that matches the ending of the conjugated verb, as you can see in the image below
As you can see in the above example, QUERER is the part of the structure that you conjugate or change to indicate who is the action about. This is a second group verb and a stem-changing one. So we would have to take this into account. The resulting conjugated verb would be like this:
QUIERO, QUIERES, QUIERE, QUEREMOS, QUERÉIS, QUIEREN.
As DESPERTARSE is a reflexive verb, we keep the verb the same, up to the infinitive ending, which we can use as it is. But once past that point, you need to think about what to do with that ‘SE’. It might be the case that it stays ‘SE’, if you need the third person singular or plural, like when you say quiere levantarSE. But otherwise you may need to consider other possibilities. All the bits that a reflexive verb may need are:
ME, TE, SE, NOS, OS , SE
Now… Time to practice. Once you are ready check here.
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