Why not yo gusto?
To say "I like Mexican food" in Spanish you say "me gusta comida mexicana", but why isn't is "yo gusto comida mexicana". Don't conjugated verbs end in o whenever you say "I blank"
I was laying in bed and it got me thinking lol.
4 Answers
Because the subject of the sentence is the mexican food, not you.
In Spanish, you don't say you like something, you say that the thing pleases you.
We actually have a word in English that's quite similar: disgust.
It is, at its core, the same root as gustar, it's just the opposite meaning due to the "dis" part.
And we use it the same: Mexican food disgusts you, not the other way around. You don't disgust mexican food.
If you ever have trouble with expressing liking something, think of it disgusting you instead. Now think of it "gusting" you, and you have the structure for liking something in Spanish.
The verb disgustar also exists in Spanish, by the way, but it carries a slightly different meaning. Less the English sense of disgust, and more the sense of displeasure.
Hi trqkkr. English is strictly an SVO language. This means that subject-verb-object are in that order only (except for certain sayings in “poetic” usage). Spanish is usually an SVO language; sometimes, however, it’s OVS. That is to say, for certain verbs, the order is reversed, and the verb only acts like a third-person verb. Gustar is the best example of such a verb. English used to have a grammatical structure like this, but it fell out of use in the 1700s. The best example of a vestige of this usage is the Shakespearean or the biblical utterance, “Me thinks thou dost protest too much.” Notice that it’s not “I think,” but “me thinks,” with the third-person singular –s marker on the verb. This OVS usage (as opposed to the more common SVO usage [in both English and Spanish]) did not fall out of use for some verbs in Spanish. It depends upon the verb.
Great answers above.
We actually have a case of this in English. Well, probably several of them, but one verb specifically, that not only works this way, but also is a cognate. Why professors and texts don't use it as an example is totally beyond me. Just a stupid missed opportunity to give students a lightbulb moment. It's my own dumb little example, but I've found it helps people.
So, in English, we don't have gustar, true. But, the Spanish have desgustar (though not frequently used, and I think, maybe fully archaic, I'm not sure) and we English speakers have "to disgust", which is a pretty obvious cognate, even if in negation form compared to gustar.
We don't say, when we REALly don't like something, that "We disgust it" We say "It disgusts us" or "They disgust us" (note how the conjugation changes in plural, just as it does for gustar in Spanish) or "It disgusts me"
Anyway, if you think about how we say like something in English, it's not like Spanish's way at all. But if you talk about REALly disliking it (being disgusted by it) then it's very much in the Spanish method.
hth roger
So this means the verb gusto is only an exception right??
For ex. we don't say me quiera instead of yo quiero, right??
Please tell me yes!
