Beginners series 1
Beginners 34: Dedicar and dedicarse
Learn how to use dedicarse in a natural way in your everyday Spanish.
Lis Salinas
Colombiana
Rob
Inglés
Transcript
Spanish Obsessed Beginners Episode 34. In this episode, we are going to talk about the verb dedicar, which means "to dedicate", but it's used in so many different ways and appears in a couple of very common questions. And it appears in so many conversations that you'll have, just like it does in English. So there's actually two versions of this verb which we're going to talk about. One is:
TranslationSo what's the difference? Well, dedicarse is a reflexive verb. So what does that mean? If you haven't heard of reflexive verbs before, a reflexive verb is indicated by that SE, the se, at the end of dedicarse, and it means that we need to conjugate the reflexive pronoun, that's the se, we won't go into how to do that in this podcast, but we'll put a table of the conjugations in the notes to this podcast and will also link to podcasts where you can find out more about how to do that. But the important thing to remember is that the se, the reflexive part of the verb actually changes the meaning of the verb. Now usually it adds the meaning "oneself". And that's obviously why it's called reflexive. So if dedicar means "to dedicate", then what does dedicarse mean? "To dedicate oneself". So we'll start with the verb dedicarse, the reflexive verb. So the most common use for dedicarse is to dedicate oneself to a profession or an industry. And the reason we're talking about it is because there's a really common question that everyone asks pretty much as soon as they first meet someone. So you'll hear this so often. And what is that?
TranslationSo note the stress there on dedicas, it's not ¿a qué te dedicas?, it's ¿a qué te dedicas? So here the literal translation is "to what do you dedicate yourself", which sounds very poetic as translated Spanish so often does. But really, it means "what do you do? What do you do for a living?" So what do you dedicate yourself to as a profession or an industry? So how can we answer this? As we mentioned, dedicarse is used with an industry or passion or a profession. It's not used with an individual job. So how would you say "I work in education?"
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