BASIC SPANISH: A GRAMMAR AND WORKBOOK

UNIT ELEVEN

Object pronouns

In Spanish, as in English, there are two types of object pronouns – direct and indirect. In
a sentence such as:

My brother sent a letter to his girlfriend.

‘My brother’ is the subject of the verb, i.e. the person who carried out the action of the
verb; ‘a letter’ is the direct object, i.e. the thing which directly received the effect of the
verb; and ‘his girlfriend’ is the indirect object, i.e. she benefits from the act of sending
and therefore plays an indirect role in the process.
In English the indirect object is often introduced by ‘to’ or ‘for’, but sometimes a
change in word order leads to the ‘to’ or ‘for’ being omitted:

My brother sent his girlfriend a letter.

It is important to be able to work out which is the direct and which is the indirect object,
because this will affect which pronoun is used in Spanish.

Direct objects and direct object pronouns

When the direct object of a verb is a person, it must always be preceded by a in Spanish –
this is called the personal a:

John sees the children.

Juan ve a los niños.

but

John sees the cars.

Juan ve los coches.

As we have seen before, pronouns are used to replace a noun, so instead of saying:

John sees the cars.

Assuming that both the speaker and the listener know what is being referred to, we can
use the direct object pronoun to replace ‘the cars’ and say: