Indirect Objects/Reflexive Verbs
Hello, I just finished my first semester of Spanish, and am rather confused about the functions of indirect objects and reflexive verbs. I understand that the indirect object of an action indicates to/for whom/what an action takes place (e.g. I baked a cake (direct object) for you (indirect object)), but I am not sure when one would use the indirect object as opposed to, say, a prepositional pronoun such as para. For instance, one of the uses of para is to indicate the recipient of an action. So if you wanted to say "The grandmother prepared the food for her grandchildren," you could say, in Spanish:
La abuela preparó la comida para sus nietos.
However, my textbook assures me that, when mentioning the indirect object, the indirect object pronoun must always be used. By this stipulation, the above sentence would need to be changed to:
La abuela les preparó la comida a sus nietos.
So I ask, is one of these methods more correct than the other? Is one of them incorrect?
Also, I am confused as to why reflexive verbs are necessary. For instance, if you wanted to say "We wash our hands before eating," in Spanish, would it be necessary to use a relfexive verb?
I know that you could say:
Nos lavamos las manos antes de comer.
But, could you also say:
Nosotros lavamos nuestros manos antes de comer. ?
Thank you in advance for your help!
5 Answers
Part of what makes it confusing for English speakers is that "reflexive verbs" are part of a class of verbs called pronomial verbs that are used a lot more often in Romance languages like French and Spanish than in English.
Pronomial verbs are just verbs that are used with reflexive pronouns (me/te/se/nos/os) that refer to the subject of the verb. When these reflexive pronouns are used with certain verbs like lavar, the verb takes on a reflexive meaning, in other words they indicate that the subject does the action to or for himself/herself. The use of the reflexive pronoun in these cases of "reflexive verbs" doesn't seem necessary from an English speaker's point of view because the equivalent expression in English often doesn't use them.
However because languages lack 1:1 correlation, learning another language means learning another set of rules and guidelines.
So in your example about washing hands, whereas in English we would use a possessive pronoun "our" to say "We wash our hands before eating," Spanish uses the reflexive pronoun "nos" to convey that it is our hands we are washing. "Nos lavamos las manos antes de comer."
As far as I understand (as I'm not a native speaker), with Spanish you'll often see indirect object pronouns (me/te/le/nos/os/les) or reflexive pronouns (me/te/se/nos/os) used instead of a possessive pronoun like we would in English to convey the same meaning. Online translators going from English to Spanish will often get this wrong because they translate the possessive pronoun from English directly to Spanish when the correct/preferred usage in Spanish would not use a possessive pronoun.
Here's a more complicated example:
Se me durmió el pie = my foot went to sleep
(dormirse means to fall asleep, "se" here is a reflexive pronoun referring to the leg which is the subject of the verb, "me" here is an indirect object pronoun used to convey that it is my leg that falls asleep)
Edit: just to clarify, when I mentioned possessive pronoun here I meant (my, your, our, etc.) which in Spanish is mi/tu/su/nuestro/etc. I think they are often referred to as possessive adjectives instead of being lumped in with possessive pronouns.
Hi, and welcome to the forum. These are excellent questions. I'll try to explain a little. In your second example, regarding reflexive verbs: It's just the way it is. You have to forget about couching Spanish in the terms that work for English and accept that Spanish is its own system, and reflexive verbs are common and necessary. When referring to actions that one undertakes that refer to oneself, especially with regards to things like washing yourself, getting yourself up, shaving, dressing yourself, reflexive verbs are always used. Actually, these make more sense in terms of English than many reflexive verbs. For instance, if you want to wake up your friend you might use despertar, but if you want to wake yourself up you use despertarse.
Despertó a mi amigo = I woke up my friend.
Me desperté = I woke myself up (I got up). In this case, just like English.
By the way, in your example, it is
Nos lavamos las manos antes de comer. The reflexive pronoun is nos, not nosotros, and mano is feminine (speaking of exceptions).
Regarding your first question:
La abuela preparó la comida para sus nietos. This is correct. You would not put the I.O. les in front of preparó, because when you use para, you do not use the indirect object - which in this case can be called the anticipatory indirect object, because it anticipates the actual direct object which follows.
However, sometimes you always use the anticipatory indirect object, for instance with decir, you say
Les dije a mis amigos, not Dije a mis amigos.
I believe your second example is also good:
La abuela les preparó la comida a sus nietos. The 'a' here is the personal 'a', there is no preposition such as para. However, if you used para, you would not insert les.
With regard to this last point, it is possible there are some finer points that I don't get, so wait for a more advanced speaker to confirm this.
Saludos, J
Thank you all so much for taking the time to answer my questions! Your responses really did clear things up. Thanks again!
I don't want to expand on the advice Jeremias has given you because he's done a much better job than I could have, however I do have one piece of advice. In the "Learn Spanish" portion of this website, there are some really good lessons on these two subjects. I would recommend watching the videos and doing the activities for these lessons. They helped A LOT when I was learning these in my spanish class. I'll put the links to them below.
Lesson 2.3 - Parties with Direct and Indirect Object Pronouns
Addition : I was told that in Spanish you can't use a possessive pronoun with body parts. With body parts one has to use the definite article. So ' lavamos nuestros manos' is wrong. It should be ' Nos (=reflexive) lavamos las manos.'
Every language has its own peculiarities, hasn't it? Welcome to SD.
