Direct/Indirect Object Pronouns
Hello everyone,
I just finished up the unit on "direct and indirect object pronouns" in my textbook and feel because all those las/los/la/le... scattered within sentences were starting to bug me! One issue my textbook brings up is the issue of an "uncertain" indirect object. For example:
"Le di el dinero"
means "I gave him/her the money". But this can also be written:
"Le di el dinero a Juan"
which, if I am understanding this correctly, means "I gave Juan the money." The "a Juan" is added to clarify the indirect object pronoun "le". In this case, however, why even include the pronoun "le" in the sentence, since the actual indirect object is specified? Would something like
"Di el dinero a juan"
make sense? If you are using the preposition "a", why do you have to include the indirect object pronoun?
Thanks for the help. My textbook is a little terse on the explanations.
5 Answers
make sense? If you are using the preposition "a", why do you have to include the indirect object pronoun?
Books should include this explanation, but they don't, for some reason. Consider this sentence in English:
I like it when you are happy.
You can simply say "I like it", but you don't you say "I like when you are happy". Why do you have to include that "it" when you say "when you are happy"? To a Spanish speaker, this is a mystery, and a source of constant mistakes, because in Spanish, you can't have both at the same time, but in English, you must.
The reason behind these peculiar behaviour is beyond the scope of a tiny post, but suffice to say that in both cases, the hearer is being warned about what to expect later on in the sentence, so he/she can interpret the whole thing correctly. It might sound illogical (and objectively, it is), but this is how languages work. If you suppress that seemingly redundant "le", natives are likely to be shocked and confused, because that "redundancy" is a warning for us to know how to read the rest of the sentence.
Accept it and learn how to use it, because it is not redundant... for a native.
To English speakers, it does seem reduntant at first.
Watch video 2.3 in the learn section and it will help clear it up.
¡Buena suerte!
The grammatical rule is that the indirect object pronoun (le) should be present regardless of whether the indirect object phrase (a Juan) is or not (Edit: as Lazarus said, this is commonly but not always the case. Only Siths deal in absolutes). This means that "le di el dinero a Juan" can be shortered to "le di el dinero" but not to "di el dinero a Juan". I understand your question since when translating it into English the grammatically incorrect phrase makes more sense but you have to remember that this isn't English. For me, you are asking why a thing is the way it is and all I can tell you is that's just how it is/the rule. It's a question that would parallel "why do they use a different alphabet?" Well.... because they do.
When viewing le di or any other combination of a D.O.P. or I.O.P. with a verb, try and see "le di" together as one single phrase rather than two separate words. I think this is how native speakers see it. Without the le, the following verb has a different feeling to it since it is no longer the same "single phrase".
Lazarus said:
Accept it and learn how to use it
Advice to live by when studying languages. 
The grammatical rule is that the indirect object pronoun (le) must ALWAYS be present regardless of whether the indirect object phrase (a Juan) is or not.
I'm sorry to differ, but that is not quite true:
Nunca doy dinero a los pobres.
Sentences without the anticipatory pronoun are far more common in literary Spanish, but even in spoken Spanish you see them every now and them (under certain premises, of course). In any case, that "ALWAYS" is not really a rule.
