i noticed you dropped the "de" in your "darse cuenta de " example. Please could you explain (in english if possible) when its ok to do this?

I believe that one cant go wrong by always adding the "de" but people frequently do omit it.

Annoyingly, all the discussion about this and dequeismo that i can find on the net is written in spanish grammar jargon which , to me, is even more obscure than english grammar jargon

It is interesting, as I continue in my learning, I pick up more and more of the subtle differences in the languages, and this is just one of those things that you have to sort of pick up through listening to speech and you become more comfortable with. So I used to watch movies and when someone said "aqui tiene", I would be very confused, because my mind would run around trying to figure out who "tiene" was referring to, but now I really don't even think about it because that phrase is almost always used between two people talking formally directly to each other. When I talk to people in Spanish, I just think about sort of treating them as a third person and it helps, but it just takes some time and practice and it becomes more natural...not like some other language differences that I must drill into my head and I will NEVER be comfortable saying lol, like reflexive verbs. I seriously have arguments with my sister over this (she is a Spanish teacher), because I don't care what language you speak, your keys don't forget themselves! YOU forget your keys, or YOU lose your wallet lol. Your keys don't sit inside your car with you staring through the window thinking "man, if only I would have remembered to jump into the pocketbook, I would be so much happier." They are keys, they don't do anything. 

A otra vez, gracias por ayudarme! 

-Kevin

Ahh yes, but would you not agree that occasionally keys get lost?

Who? is doing the "getting" here? the keys? Apparently, no one wants to take the blame :-)

The passive voice and the spanish, reflexive as passive, are useful techniques for avoiding conflict.
The internal logic doesnt have to make sense

Sure we all "know" that technically "someone" was responsible, but we need to focus on finding the keys rather than apportioning blame so that, hopefully, by the time we give up looking you'll have calmed down and i wont get spanked. you wont spank me.

I suspect that spanish speakers dont actually hear "the keys forgot themseves to me" in spanish any more than we are misled that "talking to the toilet" involves talking or that"she hacks me off" involves hacking.  When we learn a language by ear we learn what sounds right and which bunch of sounds goes with which concept.

As long as we natives all "know" what the chunk means "we" dont need to worry how the phrase would translates to another language. Thats something for gramarians linguists and foreign students to worry about. (or should that be worry over) :-)

Now you have got me thinking more about reflexive verbs and english. Please bear with me, Im having an epifany (or a breakdown). Hopefully it will all make sense and might help others see that reflexives arent that odd after all.

"They are keys, they don't do anything"

But we can say that keys lock and unlock things even though one could insist that we really need people to use the keys for locking and unlocking things?
can one say "keys unlock doors" in spanish i wonder? las llaves se abre las puertas perhaps?

when keys rust, who? is doing the rusting? the keys or the oxygen in the air or are they both working together to create rust. It feels reciprocal and hence reflexive to me. I honestly dont know but ill lay you a big six to five that in spanish "the keys are rusting" will involve a reflexive verb.  it may seem silly to say that "they are rusting themselves", but how else can you provide a subject for the verb?

Similarly, when keys collide with one another we english speakers dont have a problem saying that "the keys" are jingling, when it might be more empirically correct to say that we are creating a noise by banging them together its just tidier to imagine that  "the keys are doing it for themselves".

It seems to me that very often in in english we say that "things are..." when referring to an attribute .

but when we say:
"the keys are cold", the keys are the subject and "are" is the verb "to be" conjugated in the third person plural because there are several keys and " They" are the things performing the verb. The keys are the things that BE so..

the keys..are..cold = the keys..they (the keys) be..cold

which seems, not a million miles away from,
"they be themselves cold".
In English, we usually include the subject twice because so many of our conjugations are ambiguous. It strikes me that this is not unlike the spanish reflexive.

is it that you dont like people trying to avoid responsibility or that the reflexive as passive sounds ridiculous when translated into english?

The first is annoying in any language but isuspect that its only we students of spanishwho hear the latter. the native speaker just hears the meaning. i.e. it doesnt soundsilly in spanish, only in english.

you could always say "las llaves eran olvidados" if you want to divert attention from your forgetfulness and dont want to use a reflexive. That way no one gets the blame but i believe youll sound more like a gringo. :-)

For instance, if my friend says he likes symphonies in general, I can say "a mi me gustan conciertos."

But if my friend says that he loves the symphonies of Rachmaninov, I could say "a mi me gustan los conciertos," meaning the 4 piano concertos by Rachmaninov, right?

It seems to me that when a native speaker like lililana says that "spanish" is putting the blame on the keys she is not being literal. I remember as a small child learning how to add numbers greater than 10 and being told that "a little man took all the 10s to the house next door". now obviously this is nonsense but it helped me learn the algorithm of "carry the tens.

I see it as the difference between buying a house off plan and actually walking around inside the finished building. clearly a plan is not a building it is an abstraction, an interpretation and "the keys forgot themselves" to me" is not english or spanish it too is an abstaction designed to help you understand why each bit of the phrase is there and to enable a system of rules that will let you then "conciously" manipulate the verb like lego bricks.

Native speakers learn to manipulate the parts of a verb completely "unconciously" and are therefore untroubled by any ridiculous self referencial imagery. I suspect that users like hypersport who have , i believe, learnt most of their spanish by ear, in the wild, have a far more intuitive understanding of how you can switch the bits around and how this affects their meaning without ever having heard someone say "las llaves han olvidado si mismos hacia alguien" which, i'll bet, sounds as silly in spanish as it does english because it is neither, its simply an attempt to assign a gramatical role to each part of the phrase

I think its better to just memorize a few of these phrases instead of over analyzing them. This way you can get a little more comfortable with the structure.

Se me olvidaron las llaves(I forgot my keys). Se me olvidó la tarjeta de crédito(I forgot my credit card).

I've always rationalised the "forgot themselves" bit simply as a variation on the "se bebe mucha cerveza " idea i.e. much (much beer is drunk/ one drinks a lot of beer).

Back when I learned that one (hic) could conjugate a verb in the third person and add a "se" to make impersonal and general pronouncements, nobody attempted to explain it to me in terms of things drinking themselves or anything like that, its was just, "what you did" if you wanted to comunicate a similar idea to "one does x" or "x is done."

later i learn that with reflexive verbs that the pronoun means him/them/yourself blah blah blah but that all just complicates things. To me, its basically "the same trick." to my ear its just good ol "se" which is a catch all pronoun that keeps things vague

Even when it represents"they" or "themselves" there is an inexact and out of focus quality to it. they? how many exactly? yourself? ( or should that be yourselves)

the bit that, has always bugged "me" about "the keys forget themselves to me" explanation is the "to me" bit. It makes absolutely no sense at all. (taken literally) either the keys get the blame or i do, it cant be both. Even thinking of the indirect object pronoun as meaning on my behalf doesnt help. So the action of the verb ends with me but what does that actually mean???

However, it now occurs to me that this could indeed be the indication of the true culprit that you are looking for the keys were forgotten (and i was vaguely involved) still tells us who is the real villain is whilst mutely appealing for clemency. ( just not in so many words :-)

During the beginning I needed to make sense of it all, had to have a reason why things are the way they are. 

Then little by little I stopped worrying so much about making it relate to English and just started to get the "meaning" and as the structure would keep popping up either in books, or movies or with people, etc it got to the point that I was getting accustomed to it, and I knew how it felt. 

Then when you say something enough times or hear it enough times as Kikuyu says, you can forget completely about how it translates in English and just know what it means.  That's a cool feeling when you recognize that you're not translating stuff in your head. 

¡confiesalo! Tú olvidaste tu tarjeta de crédito, el tarjeta es inocente. aunque obviamente, es la verdad que las llaves siempre caminan por si mismos :-)

Oye hypersport,

Gracias, amigo, estoy perfectamente! (Es que no funciona el sistema de mensajes, lo siento. )

Puesto que estoy aquí -- Déjenme decirles que esta plática me recuerda al cuento de Julio Cortázar, "Instrucciones para subir una escalera." Todos sabemos que el analizar no es lo mismo como el hacer; aun así, el análisis tiene su encanto :-)

Hablando de verbos reflexsivos, acabo de darme cuenta de un error que hice anteriormente donde escribí: "se puede acostumbrarse"

Debe ser: "así puede acostumbrarse o "así se puede acostumbrar"