Indirect object pronouns

WE ARE currently learning about ‘indirect object pronouns’ and in the last article, I gave you a very brief recap of what ‘direct object pronouns’ are so that you are at least aware of the difference. As with many grammatical terms, the function is expressed in the name. ‘Object’ always refers to the person or thing, which receives the action of a verb, ‘pronoun’ is something that replaces a noun and we say ‘indirect’ because the action of the verb is received ‘indirectly’, of course.

We finished last week with the example in English: ‘The boy throws it to her’ (we were talking about a ball). We can label the words like this – ‘the boy’ is the subject; ‘throw’ is the verb; ‘it’ is the direct object pronoun (receiving the ‘direct’ action of ‘throw’) and ‘her’ is the indirect object pronoun (receiving the ‘indirect’ action of the verb – in other words, the person to whom the ball is thrown).

We finished off by saying that the most difficult thing about this in Spanish is the word order, as it is literally: ‘The boy to her it throws’ – ‘El niño se la tira’ (‘it’ here is ‘la’ because it is the pronoun replaces the feminine word ‘la pelota’). We can make matters even worse (just stick with me for a couple more sentences) by substituting ‘the boy’ for the subject pronoun ‘he’. In English, we now have ‘He throws it to her’. Put into Spanish word order we have: ‘He to her it throws’ which is ‘Él se la tira’. However, as you know, in Spanish we often miss out the subject pronoun ‘Él’. So the end result is the three-word sentence: ‘se la tira’ (to her – it – throws). On its own ‘se la tira’ makes about as much sense as Egyptian hieroglyphics, which leads me to my next, very important, point.

The whole reason for pronouns is that they replace nouns that we already know about. Going back to the sentence ‘He throws it to her’ – this is completely meaningless in English as well unless you know who he is, who she is (that is ‘her’) and what it is. In other words, a sentence that contains pronouns in any language is a sort of shorthand, which only makes sense to people who have some prior information

. This is why you can never understand what people are talking about at the next table in a restaurant. It’s because they’re saying things like: ‘Well I told him about it, but he said that she didn’t agree with them’ and unless you know what all those pronouns refer to, it all sounds like gibberish. There you are, and you thought it was because your Spanish was rubbish! Next time you’re with someone who says ‘You’re learning Spanish, what are those people talking about?’ You can say: ‘I don’t know because they’re using too many direct and indirect object pronouns’. That should shut them up for a bit.

Okay, so here are the indirect object pronouns in Spanish:

Me Nos Te Os Le (or ‘se’) Les (or ‘se’) To finish off, here are some sentences using the first and second person indirect object pronouns for you to ponder over: ‘Me lo dio’ (he or she gave it to me); ‘Te lo mandaron’ (they sent it to you); ‘¿nos lo dijiste?’ (Did you tell us (it)?) ‘Os la pasé’ (‘I passed it to you: ‘it’ being something feminine like ‘la sal’ (the salt).

See you next week, but be warned, we’ll be tackling ‘le’ and ‘se’.