Gustar and the 7 Other Spanish Verbs That Work Backwards

By Daniel Herrera, Spanish teacher and curriculum designer

Updated July 31, 2026 · Reviewed by the Audaz editorial team

Why does gustar feel backwards to English speakers?

Because you were handed the wrong translation on day one. Textbooks say gustar means “to like”. It does not. Gustar means something close to “to be pleasing”. Swap the translation and nothing is backwards any more.

Word for word, me gusta el chocolate says “chocolate is pleasing to me”. The chocolate does the work. You receive it.

English hides this split. We have one verb, “like”, and the person does the liking. Spanish divides the job between two people in the sentence. The thing pleases. The person gets pleased. That is the entire difference, and it fits in one line.

It is worth getting right early, because gustar is not a rare verb you can dodge. It arrives in your first month of Spanish, and it sets the pattern for a whole family of verbs you will use every hour of every day.

What does gustar actually mean in Spanish?

Open the Real Academia Española dictionary and look at the first meaning listed for gustar: sentir y percibir el sabor de las cosas (to feel and perceive the flavour of things). Tasting. “To please” comes third on the list, and “to like” never appears as a translation at all.

That is the key to the whole verb. Gustar comes from the Latin gustare, to taste. So me gusta el libro sits closer to “the book tastes good to me” than to “I like the book”. The book supplies the flavour. You get the taste of it.

Hold that picture. It explains the grammar better than any chart, because a flavour is obviously the thing acting on you. Nobody is confused about which way round taste works.

Did gustar always work this way?

No, and this is the part almost nobody tells learners. Spanish speakers once used gustar the way English uses “like”, with the person as the subject. The construction flipped over several centuries.

Andrea Mojedano Batel tracked the change in the Journal of Historical Linguistics in December 2025, using corpus data from the 13th to the 19th centuries. The finding, in the paper’s own words, is that the verb “went from having a nominative experiencer to having a dative one”. In plain English: the person started out as the subject and ended up as an indirect object.

That direction is unusual. Languages normally push the other way, turning awkward cases into plain subjects over time. Gustar swam against the current.

The old version has not vanished either. The RAE dictionary still lists gustar de, as in gustar de correr (to like running). It reads as formal now, and you will meet it in older books. It is the fossil of exactly the grammar you keep trying to use.

So the sentence you keep wanting to say was real Spanish once. You are about five hundred years late, that is all.

What is the one rule that fixes gustar for good?

Put the thing first. Spanish lets you say el libro me gusta just as happily as me gusta el libro. Both are correct, and native speakers use both.

Textbooks drill the second order almost exclusively. That is the order that feels alien to an English speaker, because the subject turns up at the end. So drill the other one instead.

Say the thing-first version out loud for a week. El chocolate me gusta. Esta canción me gusta. Los lunes no me gustan. The subject now sits where your English brain expects a subject, and the agreement becomes obvious rather than mysterious.

Those six pronouns are the indirect object pronouns, and they are the same set you use everywhere else in Spanish. If they still feel shaky, our complete guide to Spanish pronouns covers the full system. Learning them pays off twice, because they carry this whole verb group.

Which 8 Spanish verbs work backwards like gustar?

These eight cover almost everything you need at A2 to B1. Each one puts the thing in the subject slot and the person in the indirect object slot, exactly like gustar. Learn the pattern once and you have learned all eight.

1. Gustar (to be pleasing)

The one everyone starts with. Me gustan tus zapatos (your shoes are pleasing to me, or in normal English, I like your shoes). Use it for things, activities and, carefully, people.

2. Encantar (to delight)

The upgrade. Me encanta este pueblo (I love this village). The RAE’s Diccionario panhispánico de dudas defines this sense of encantar as gustar mucho, to like a lot, and confirms it is intransitive with an indirect object of person. The intensity is already baked in, which matters for one of the mistakes below.

3. Doler (to hurt)

Me duele la cabeza (my head hurts, literally the head hurts to me). Notice the article. Spanish says la cabeza, not mi cabeza, because the pronoun me has already told everyone whose head it is. This one alone will make you sound less foreign in a pharmacy.

4. Importar (to matter)

No me importa (it does not matter to me, or I do not mind). Also the polite request formula: ¿Te importa si abro la ventana? (do you mind if I open the window?). Extremely common, and rarely taught as part of this group.

5. Interesar (to interest)

Me interesa la historia (history interests me). Handy at B1, because it lets you talk about what you care about without repeating gustar six times in a paragraph.

6. Molestar (to bother)

Me molesta el ruido (the noise bothers me). Careful with the English cognate. Molestar means to bother or annoy, and nothing stronger. Complaining about a noisy neighbour is its normal job.

7. Faltar (to be missing)

Me faltan tres páginas (I am three pages short, literally three pages are missing to me). This is how Spanish counts what you still owe or still need. Nos falta tiempo means we are short of time.

8. Quedar (to be left)

Me quedan dos capítulos (I have two chapters left). The close cousin of faltar, seen from the other side. Faltar counts what is missing. Quedar counts what remains. Both put the number in the subject slot.

One honest caveat. Some of these verbs have other lives too. Quedar also means to arrange to meet (quedamos a las ocho, we are meeting at eight) and to fit or suit (te queda bien, it suits you). Faltar can simply mean to be absent. The backwards pattern is one job these verbs do, and it is the job you will meet most often.

Why do Spaniards say “a mí me gusta”?

Because that is emphasis, not clumsy repetition. A mí me gusta and me gusta both mean I like it. The a mí adds weight, roughly: I like it, whatever the rest of you think.

It also clears up who you mean. Le gusta could be he, she, or you in the formal register. Add the phrase and the fog lifts: a ella le gusta. The pronoun still stays. Spanish keeps both parts, and dropping the le would be an error.

So use the long version when you are disagreeing or drawing a contrast. Leave it out the rest of the time. Sprinkling a mí into every sentence is a common learner tic and it sounds oddly insistent.

What mistakes do English speakers make with these verbs?

Five errors account for most of the trouble. Each one comes from translating the English sentence straight across. They join the wider set of Spanish grammar mistakes foreigners make, and this group is where they cluster.

• Me gusto instead of me gusta, which changes the meaning entirely
• Me encanta mucho, which says “a lot” twice
• Mi cabeza duele instead of me duele la cabeza
• Me gusta about a colleague, which announces a crush
• Me gustan leer y escribir, where the verb should stay singular

Where will you meet these verbs in real Spanish?

Everywhere, and the best place to feel the pattern is a book. Pablo Neruda opened Poema 15 of Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 1924) with a line most Spanish speakers can recite from memory: Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente (I like you when you are quiet because you are as if absent).

Look at what gustar is doing there. The subject is the person he is talking to. Neruda himself is the indirect object, the me. The verb ends in -s because it agrees with “you”, never with him. One line of poetry teaches the rule better than a term of worksheets.

That is the whole Audaz method in miniature. Grammar sticks when it turns up inside a sentence you actually met and cared about. If you want more of that, start with our guide to reading books in Spanish as a beginner, then pick something from our list of Spanish novels for beginners. You will meet gustar and most of its seven relatives on the first page.

The rest of the grammar cluster works the same way. We have done the same job on ser vs estar, on the Spanish subjunctive, and on the imperfect and the preterite. One rule each, no charts to memorise.

Frequently asked questions