¡Hola Amigos!

This week, I’m going to take a section out of our Level II verb course for you to take a look at to help you learn direct object pronouns. At the end of the blog post, I’ll give you a link where you can download a free 7-day trial of Level II.

Are you ready? Here we go:

Now we’re going to learn about direct objects in Spanish. One of the good things about learning Spanish is that you learn more about English at the same time. If you’re like the average person, you probably learned about direct object pronouns in junior high, high school, or even college, then forgotten about them. Here, we’ll refresh your memory and you’ll probably learn them better here than you ever did in English class. Basically, in a nutshell, direct objects receive the action of a sentence or phrase and are words like he, she, it and them.

For example, if I said “I’m waiting for Juanita”, “Juanita” is the direct object because she receives the action of the sentence. Now, to simplify a little bit, if I’m talking about Juanita, I don’t have to say her name, “Juanita”, every time I mention her. Instead, I can use what’s called a direct object pronoun and simply replace “Juanita” with “her”. For example, I could simply say “I’m waiting for her”. Since the word “her” receives the action, It’s called a direct object pronoun.

In Spanish here are the direct object pronouns when we’re talking about people:

Now let’s learn how to use these in Spanish. Are you ready? The tricky part is that the direct object pronouns come before the verb instead of after the verb like we’re used to in English. Let’s take a look at a few.

The phrase “I see her” would be “La veo”.

Some of you may have learned that you can say “Veo a ella”. This is completely correct but isn’t as common as “La veo”. The phrase “La veo” is sort of like a shortcut.

Let’s try a few more: (leave the chart above on the screen with just the pronouns)

“They see me”. To do this one in Spanish, first we look at the direct object (“me”) and put it at the front of our Spanish verb “Me ven”. The direct object pronouns look the same in both languages but it is just a coincidence. In Spanish, it is pronounced “meh” and in English “me”. Anyway, after putting “me” in front, then you conjugate “they see” (arrow) which is “ven”. So, “they see me” would be “me ven”.

That’s as far as we’ll go this week in helping you learn Spanish direct object pronouns.

For more, please go to our Level II Course Free 7-Day Trial and have fun!

Hasta luego Amigos!