Two letters. Two monstrous letters, two letters that made me fail the test-out exam of the 3rd quarter of my Spanish course. 😠 Se. And I'm not talking about sé, because that's the "yo" conjugation of saber, which means "to know (a fact)". I'm referring to the word that's sometimes a reflexive pronoun, sometimes a dangling word that seems to have no purpose. And yet we will see that there is more to se than we might have realised.
The most common use of se is what SpanishDict calls "the passive se". This is the kind of se that shows that a verb was performed, but the subject is unknown. For example:
El pan se come. ｜The bread was eaten.
Do we know who or what ate the bread? No, the subject is not mentioned. Passive se is by far the easiest use to master.
The second use of se is called "the impersonal se". This is used to make general statements about people or "one". For example:
Se come bien a la playa. ｜You eat well at the beach.
"You" also could mean "One" if you know Middle English, as in "One eats well at the beach". It's not referring to anyone in particular, just a general person. Also, both impersonal and passive se use the 3rd person singular conjugation of a verb (he, she, it, you [formal]).
The third use of se is as a reflexive pronoun. I remember talking to my mom about this use a while ago when reading the Bible in Spanish. I came across the word alegrase and I was very confused. Alegrar means "to rejoice", and it's an imperative command meaning "Rejoice in yourselves...." This is actually a type of the impersonal se.