The beast known as indirect object pronouns
I seem to understand the grammatical uses of Indirect object pronouns and DOP's. But why is it the hardest concept to understand for Spanish students? When asked,that is the biggest stumbling block.
4 Answers
It's because it works so much differently than English. It's just something that takes some getting used to. Once you do it flows pretty easily and naturally.
One thing that really helped me was to practice with "verbs like gustar". 90% of the DOPs and IOPs that you encounter will work pretty much like that. (In my opinion) Once you get that part...the rest seems to be fairly easily acquired.
I really recommend "Practice Makes Perfect- Pronouns and Prepositions" by Dorothy Richmond. It's a workbook for about $10. It helped me a lot.
Also, even in English it is hard for us to determine what is a direct object or an indirect object, especially in short sentences where one of the objects may be implied.
Tell him. Is the him a d.o.p. or an i.o.p. with an implied "it"? Is it tell him [something]? Can we tell a person?
I find it easier to recognize an intransitive sentence (verb) in Spanish than in English. Maybe that is because I'm paying attention to it in Spanish, but I don't even think about it in English.
I find this difficult too. However, seeing as I know that native speakers also commonly make grammatical errors with this (some of them are accepted even though technically incorrect) I don't feel too stupid for struggling with it!
See 'leísmo', 'laísmo'; here is an explanation I find helpful and reassuring.
As a matter of fact, we are having a chat tonight on this topic, please join us soon, you will see you have fun .
We have two newcomers, very new people to the forum and they are really happy they joined I think
ken and ron, they are both on the chat tonight.
We are doing pronouns, have a look at this flashcard set for practise.
