Él quiere hacerse médico.

English Translation

He wants to become a doctor.

Why isn’t this él quiere ser médicoz?

English Translation

He wants to become a doctor.

You can use either sentence. But if you want to emphasize the “becoming,” you need to state that he wants to become one. It’s a shift in emphasis, expressed in both the Spanish sentence and the English translation.

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English Translation

He wants to become a doctor.

Are “hacerse” and “volverse” interchangeable?

They look like they are, but a quick search suggests they aren’t. This article is questionable, since the author misunderstands the difference between ser and estar, but agrees with these other sources.

Keep in mind, there’s disagreement (weirdly), about whether you can use hacerse and volverse to talk about professions.

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Thanks @AdamBelter, for the links!

As for “volverse médico”, it sounds strange to me, like a variation on “volverse loco”. :slight_smile:

Update: Google Ngrams doesn’t even have “se volvió médico” in its corpus: “se volvió médico, se hizo médico”

It took me too long to follow that link! I’ll have to use the NGrams tool more now that you’ve shown it to me. Thanks!

I tried a few more professions to see what comes from it. The fact of disagreement seems weird now. When there are sentences about “becoming” a doctor (or anything else; there were a number without any results), they’re for hacerse instead of volverse. Whether I find out why there’s debate over this, I’ll want to make a note.

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