Hi, my name is Rebecca, and welcome to this lesson on common errors in reflexive pronouns.
Now, what is a reflexive pronoun? A reflexive pronoun is a pronoun that refers to the subject
of the sentence. In other words, the subject and the object of the sentence are the same.
Okay? In case you didn't get that, let me explain by giving you lots of examples so
you can understand very clearly. Okay? For example, I enjoyed myself at the party. Right?
We cannot say in English, "I enjoyed at the party," but, "I enjoyed myself at the party."
So, we see here that the object and the subject are the same. "I enjoyed myself at the party."
Next one, "Oh, no. You cut yourself." Okay? "You cut yourself." Okay?
Next one, "He hurt himself when playing hockey." Alright? "He hurt himself." "She talks to
herself when she's scared." "She talks to herself when she's scared." In these examples,
I'm using the reflexive pronoun correctly. Okay? After I show you how it's used correctly,
I'm going to talk to you about how it's used incorrectly. Alright?
"The cat looked at itself in the mirror." Alright? "The cat looked at itself." Very
often, we refer to animals as "it" unless we know the gender. Then, we can say "herself"
or "himself." "We taught ourselves to cook." Alright? Again, "we" and "ourselves," the
subject and the object are the same. And here, "They blamed themselves for the accident."
"They blamed themselves." Okay? These are also some common verbs where we use the reflexive
Now, what kind of mistakes do students make when they're learning to use reflexive pronouns?
These are some of them. Watch out for these in case you make the same kind of mistake.
Sometimes, people use the wrong pronoun. For example, "Both of you should be proud of
yourself." Now, that's a mistake, right? Because "both of you" is plural, so we shouldn't be
saying "yourself." We should be saying "yourselves." Okay? Just like here, we have "ourselves,"
"themselves." The same way with "you," which is a plural "you," more than one person, we
say "you" and "yourselves." "Both of you should be proud of yourselves."
Second kind of mistake with reflexive pronouns is to use the incorrect pronoun. In other
words, to invent a pronoun that doesn't actually exist in English. For example, people might
say, "They invited theirselves to the party." Right? There is no word in English like "theirselves."
So in this case, it's wrong because there is no such form. Okay?
Sometimes, the pronoun, the reflexive pronoun is used incorrectly as the subject of a sentence.
For example, "John and myself are driving." That's completely wrong. It should be "John
and I are driving." Right? Or, "John..." Right. We cannot use "myself" at all as the subject
of the sentence. Okay? So if anybody does that, that would be a mistake.
Last one is when we use the reflexive pronoun when we don't need to. Okay? Sometimes, students
learn it and then they want to use it everywhere, but there are cases in which we don't use
the reflexive pronoun. For example, when the meaning is obvious. Like, if we say, "Bob
shaved himself," that would be a mistake because hopefully, Bob shaved only himself and not
anybody else. Right? So we don't usually say, "Bob shaved himself." We just say, "Bob shaved."
Or, "She showered." Right? It's fairly obvious in that case that it is to the person, himself.
So we don't need to use any reflexive pronoun in that case.
So these are four common errors used with reflexive pronouns. If you'd like a little
bit of a longer explanation, a more deeper explanation of reflexive pronouns, I do have
another lesson on the same subject. Please visit our website at www.engvid.com. There,
you can see the other video as well as many other, hundreds of other videos on various
aspects of English. You can also do a quiz on this and see if you make any of these common