Indirect object pronouns

AS YOU know, speaking a language includes many things including self-confidence, body language, guesswork and the sheer will to communicate.

None of these factors should be underestimated in our attempts to get our message across in another language.

However, understanding the structure of the language is also important if we wish to become competent, and as you know, one of the aims of these articles is to make the grammar a little more comprehensible.

We may not be able to put it into practice straight away, but knowledge of grammar, or language structure, will help us to comprehend and give us the stepping stones to move forward.

You’ll have guessed by the length of that introduction that we’re in for a hefty bit of grammar, and you’ll be right.

Next on my list of things to write about are some wonderful things called ‘Indirect object pronouns’. If the sight of that name doesn’t fill you with foreboding, try the Spanish equivalent ‘Complementos indirectos’. Even the Spanish run away in terror at the very mention.

However, on my list it is, and that is what we shall do! You always have the option of turning the page, but maybe I’ve now got you intrigued!

One of the slightly awkward things about indirect object pronouns is that you have to already have some idea about direct object pronouns, and I actually wrote about those a long time ago.

There are four articles about them in my Step by Step Volume two, articles 65 to 68. However, here’s a quick summary, and then we’ll have to leave the rest for next week.

A ‘direct object’ is something that directly receives the action of a verb.

In the sentence, ‘The boy throws the ball’, ‘the ball’ is the direct object. If we replace ‘the ball’ with ‘it’ (‘The boy throws it’), the word ‘it’ is now the ‘direct object pronoun’ (or in Spanish complemento directo): a pronoun being a word that replaces a noun to save us having to keep repeating it.

The difficulty with Spanish is that at this point the word order is different from English. In Spanish we say ‘The boy it throws’. Now, just so there’s at least some Spanish in this article, I’ll translate the two sentences: – ‘El niño tira la pelota’; ‘El niño la tira’.

Okay, so what’s an indirect object pronoun then?

Well, if we say ‘The boy throws the ball to the girl’, ‘the ball’ is still the direct object, and the girl is the ‘indirect object’. She also receives the action of the verb ‘to throw’ but indirectly.

Again the Spanish word order is different, we are going to be saying ‘The boy to her it throws’ - only in Spanish. This is in fact ‘El niño se la tira’ but how we get to that will now have to be explained on another day.