Conjugating the Reflexive Spanish Verb Despertarse (to Wake Up)

Spanish verbs fall into different groups, and each group is conjugated a little differently. If you’re going to master Spanish verbs like despertarse, you need to be able to identify which group a verb belongs to: regular (follows regular conjugation rules for -ar, -er, and -ir verbs), stem-changing (morphs depending on how you use it in a sentence), spelling-changing (has consonant-spelling changes in some forms to follow pronunciation rules), or reflexive (reflects the action back on the subject of the sentence).

Despertarse (dehs-pehr-tahr-seh) (to wake oneself up) is a stem-changing reflexive -ar verb; in the present tense, it has an e-to-ie stem change in all but the nosotros and vosotros forms. Remember that reflexive verbs require reflexive pronouns. Here’s the present tense conjugation:

The following examples show you despertarse in action:

• Él se despierta a las siete de la mañana todos los días. (He wakes [himself] up at 7 a.m. every day.)

• ¿Se despiertan ellos a tiempo? (Do they wake up on time?)

Need to know how to conjugate despertarse in another tense? The following tables show you the preterit, imperfect, and future forms.

You use the preterit tense like this:

• ¿Te despertaste temprano? (Did you wake up early?)

• Sí. Me desperté temprano y estaba lloviendo. (Yes. I did wake up early, and it was raining.)

Here are some examples of the imperfect tense:

• Mis amigos se despertaban cantando. (My friendo used to get up singing.)

• Me despertaba cada mañana a la misma hora. (I used to wake up every morning at the same time.)

The following samples put the future tense to work:

• ¿Se despertarán ustedes a las siete de la mañana? (Will you wake up at seven in the morning?)

• Sí. Nos despertaremos a las siete. (Yes. We will get up at seven.)