Combining Spanish Pronouns
If you’ve got a good grasp on the direct pronoun and indirect pronoun, you’ll soon find situations where you need to use both of these in the same clause. If you’re a grammar geek like we are, you can appreciate a kind of beautiful simplicity in Spanish, using few words efficiently where English uses many. While combining pronouns is not particularly tricky, there are a couple of things to bear in mind. In this article, we outline what you need to know to combine the direct and indirect pronoun.
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how does using a personal pronoun clarifay “se” ? – el se lo compro- (el=compro) nothing to do with “se” ?????
In the discussion “Combining Pronouns” you use the example “se lo compró él” to clarify why a personal pronoun is sometimes necessary. But isn’t “él” in the above example being used as a subject pronoun rather than an IO pronoun? Did you mean to say “se lo compró a él”?
Hi Jim
In this example, the “él” is the subject pronoun, as you say. We use “él” to clarify, as it could equally be “se lo compró ella”, for example, and we want to emphasise and clarify that it is he that is buying, rather than she.
Hope that makes sense!