AUDAZ REVISTA
3 of 20
Textbooks teach 20 object pronoun pairs. In 10 Spanish books, three pairs make up 61% of the 1,057 pairs we counted.
01 / 08
Two questions
What? gives you the direct object: lo, la, los, las. To whom? gives you the indirect object: me, te, le, nos, os, les.
Only the third person differs. That is where all the trouble lives.
02 / 08
Person first
When you use both, the person comes first and the thing second. Always.
Yo volveré pronto, te lo juro. (Blasco Ibáñez, Los argonautas.)
03 / 08
61%
se lo is 28.2% of all pairs. se la is 19.0%. me lo is 14.1%. Add four more pairs and you reach 87%.
The last pair on the list, os los, appears once in over a million words.
04 / 08
Le becomes se
Le and les become se before lo, la, los or las. The RAE calls this se a formal variant of le(s).
Les compré caramelos becomes Se los compré.
05 / 08
80 / 20
Of the 1,323 pairs we could count safely, 80% came before the verb and 20% were attached to an infinitive or a gerund.
Te lo puedo decir. Puedo decírtelo. Keep the pair together.
06 / 08
Le vi
The RAE accepts le in place of lo for one male person. It never accepts le for a thing.
Write lo yourself and you are right everywhere.
07 / 08
Three sentences
Learn one sentence per top pair, all from real books.
Sacó un duro y se lo dio. (He took out a coin and gave it to her.)
08 / 08
Open a book
Read one page and circle every pair. Most will be one of your seven.
The full count, the RAE rules and the 10-minute plan are in the post.
Tap through for the full count, the RAE rules and the 10-minute plan.