Combining Spanish Pronouns

Rob Ashby

The Spanish Obsessive

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.

First off, let’s take a look at those pronouns side by side:

Direct Object Pronouns	Indirect Object Pronouns	Translation
me	me	me
te	te	you (informal)
lo, la	le	him, her, it, you (formal)
nos	nos	us
os	os	you (plural, informal)
los, las	les	them, you (plural, formal)

You’ll find that you need to use both types of pronoun in certain sentences – here are a couple of examples in English (direct object pronoun, indirect object pronoun):

I gave it to him

She told it to us

Word order

When both pronouns are used, the indirect pronoun goes before the direct one:

Te lo daré → I’ll give it to you

Nos lo dijo → She told us

With negative statements, the negative word (“no”, “nunca”, etc) goes before both pronouns:

No me lo dió → He/she didn’t give it to me

Some word changes

When certain pronouns combine, the indirect pronoun becomes “se”.

This…	Becomes…
Le lo	Se lo
Le la	Se la
Le los	Se los
Le las	Se las
Les lo	Se lo
Les la	Se la
Les los	Se los
Les las	Se las

As you can see, this applies when both pronouns begin with the same letter “l”. This was originally to avoid tongue-twisting – “se la” is easier to say than “le la”. In each case, either “les” or “le” becomes “se”:

Se lo compró → He/she bought it for them

As “se” can be translated in so many ways, you´ll often find speakers using a personal pronoun to clarify things. This can be placed at the start or the end:

Se lo compró él or

él se lo compró

That’s it! Those are the basics of what you need to know to combine pronouns in Spanish. As we always say, true understanding of this will come with exposure and practice. So, check out our Spanish courses and see if you can spot us using these!