How does the verb ‘gustar’ work, and why is it different from other verbs?

Let’s first start by looking at some terminology that will help us to understand this verb a lot better: the terms “subject” and “object”. The subject of a sentence is the person/thing that carries out an action or state of being. In the sentence, “John likes the cake”, John is the subject. The object of the sentence, on the other hand, is the person/thing that is being acted ‘upon’: it is not the doer of the verb, it receives the “doing action” of the verb. For example, taking the same sentence “John likes the cake”, the cake is the object, because it is the thing that is being liked by the subject, John. Now, let us look at the case of Spanish verbs. Most Spanish verbs work like English verbs, in which the person/thing who is doing the action is the subject. Take the sentence “John quiere el pastel” (John wants the cake). The verb “querer” is in the third person singular form (meaning the he/she/it form), because John is the one who is the subject of the sentence. He is the person that wants the cake. However, ‘gustar’ is a different sort of verb. It is one of a very small number of Spanish verbs in which the object and the subject seem to swap places. To understand better why this happens, let’s look at the literal translation of the infinitive of “gustar”, which is “to be pleasing”. So, the conjugation of gustar (gusto, gustas, gusta, gustamos, gustáis, gustan) means “I am pleasing, you are pleasing, he/she/it is pleasing, we are pleasing, you plural are pleasing, they are pleasing”. This means that if we are trying to translate the sentence “John likes the cake” into Spanish, we have to say “the cake is pleasing to John”. The cake is actually the subject of the sentence because it is doing the action of the verb, which is being pleasing. The way we translate this involves an indirect object pronoun (le), because it is pleasing to John. So we have to say “A John le gusta el pastel” (literally “to John the cake is pleasing”). The reason that we have put both “A John” and “le” is because in Spanish we tend to double indirect object pronouns. It’s just how the language works.The indirect object pronouns that are used with gustar are me, te, le, nos, os, les. So, if we are saying that “John and Anna like the cakes”, we say “A John y a Anna les gustan los pasteles.” The reason that we have “gustan” is because there are multiple cakes (so we pick the third person plural form of the verb ‘gustar’), and the “les”, the indirect object pronoun referring to Anna and John, is used because there is more than one person, again in the third person plural form.