The verb "poner" can be used in a variety of ways in Spanish to express different ideas. Let's practice using "poner" in the future forms to just mean "to put" something somewhere. We'll add in some practice with direct object pronouns that we have studied previously.

Another way we use the verb "poner" is with a "reflexive" pronoun. Remember that these are situations where someone does something to himself. Just to review, let's look at the chart of reflexive pronouns.

REFLEXIVE PRONOUNS

myself             me            ourselves          nos
yourself           te            themselves         se 
himself/herself    se

We can use the verb "poner" with a reflexive pronoun to express the idea of "putting on" clothing. Let's see how this would work with some sentence building practice. One thing that you will notice is that in Spanish, since we are saying that someone is putting the clothing on himself, we don't use possessive words like we do in English. Instead of saying, "I'm putting on my coat" we say "I'm putting the coat onto myself".

Another meaning which we can express with "poner" used with a reflexive pronoun and an adjective to describe a condition that someone "becomes". You might think of it as "putting" yourself in a particular "state" or "condition". As with all sentences in which we are dealing with adjectives, we have to make the adjective match the noun that it describes. Let's see how this works. We'll use the adjective "sick" which in Spanish is "enfermo". I have a picture in my mind of an amusement park and someone is warning about the consequences of riding on a wild roller coaster.

Another adjective which we can use to describe a "condition" that we get into is "happy". In Spanish we would say "contento". I can imagine a situation where someone would be very happy if they won the lottery ("ganar la lotería"). I some cases like "happy" we just say "be" rather than "become" since we mean "begin to be".