Direct and Indirect Object in Spanish III

Spanish Sentences

We have already mentioned and used the following phrase:

“Ayer Ana María compró un ramo de flores para su novia porque era su cumpleaños” (“Yesterday Ana Maria bought a bouquet of flowers for her girlfriend because it was her birthday.”)

And we have already established that key questions help us identify their function and use.

At this point, mention to students the idea that whatever is really important in a sentence and vital to its meaning cannot be removed. Once we understand that we can start to get rid of other parts of the sentence, until we are left with the core structure, which in our example would be “Ana Maria bought a bouquet of flowers”. Everything else can be removed and the sentence still makes sense (it offers less information of course, but it still works as a sentence).

At this point we can start to change information for their corresponding pronouns. Time and data are secondary information and thus do not have corresponding pronouns. The only things that are important have pronouns: the subject, the direct and the indirect object.

Subject – Direct Object – Indirect object

Next, we write the following on the board, underlining which parts of the sentence that are important to us:

Remember that pronouns in Spanish usually appear before the verb, except when it is an infinitive, gerund or positive imperative. Here, since we already have a present tense verb we can begin to replace the parts of the sentence with their corresponding pronouns step by step.

1. Change only the subject
   1. Ayer ella compró un ramo de flores para su novia…
2. Change the direct object
   1. Ayer Ana Mª lo compró para su novia…
3. Change the indirect object
   1. Ayer Ana Mª le compró un ramo de flores…
4. And now all together! But the most important thing to remember is that the indirect object goes before than the direct object.
   1. Ayer ella le lo compró…

But now we have a problem. Ask the students to look up lelo in the dictionary. Once they have done this, to prevent them from thinking that Ana Maria is a fool, tell them that whenever we have the pronoun Le followed by Lo(s) o La(s), we change it to SE (in the singular and the plural), that way we don’t end up looking silly.

Now we are left with the correct form:

2. Ayer ella se lo compró…

There will inevitably be some student that points out that the pronoun SE is ambiguous and that it looks like ANA has bought the flowers for herself. You can handle this very logical comment by reminding students that pronouns are used when referring to information that is obvious, which eliminates any possibility of confusion.

I hope you found this of interest.

See you next week!