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I was dead on about where I ******** up on my last Spanish exam--stem-changing and irregular verbs in the preterit. So I'm adding verb practice to my study routine so I can get them drilled into my brain. Have to, since the next exam is on Friday. sad

On that point, since we've got five chapters and until the end of December to cover them, why can't we SLOW THE ******** DOWN? You know, as an alternative to a quiz or exam every. single. week. Or a pop quiz on using direct and indirect object pronouns together after a single five-minute explanation where no one in the goddamned class had any clue what you were going on about. stare

Yeah. Not real happy with my Spanish teacher right now.

I like using this website to practice sometimes, though if it's just about learning the forms themselves, I would just write them down in order over and over again, covering up what was written each time, until they're memorized. Then again that works for me because I'm visual/reading learner.

Here are some directons on how to add Spanish accents and stuff to your keyboard. You'll need it to use the website I provided above.

As for direct and indirect object pronouns, I used to always get confused as to which ones go first and which follows, so I just memorized the phrase "se lo dió." (he/she gave it to him/her) That way I always know that in a sentence where both direct and indirect are present, the indirect object (the person) goes before the direct object (the physical object/abstract object).

Hope that helps. sweatdrop

That website might help, though it may have to wait a while before I browse it. My class uses myspanishlab.com (actually, I think all the language classes here use my[language]lab.com), and that's really most of our out-of-class practice. And as for just rewriting them over and over, that's basically what I do. It works eventually. sweatdrop
THAT is awesome. I've got a paper due at the end of the quarter that's supposed to be in Spanish and had no clue how I was going to manage accents and such.
My problem is more that I have trouble identifying what's the direct object and what's the indirect object in Spanish. It's easy in English, but to figure it out in Spanish I have to translate, identify, and (if necessary) rewrite. Paragraphs with lots of direct and indirect object pronouns confuse me terribly because I can't always follow what pronoun refers to what object. I usually don't have to translate sentences to understand them, unless they're pronoun-heavy (at least not consciously), but I have to in order to figure out IO and DO pronouns, which slows me down a lot.
It does. Thanks. heart

The way I remember it is that the pronouns both receive the action of the verb, but the direct object receives the action "directly," or "primarily." The person would be the one who benefits from the action of the verb "indirectly."

e.g. Se lo vendió. (el coche)

In this instance the action is to sell (vender). How do you know which is the direct object? Because the car itself is being sold. It is being "directly" or "primarily" affected by the action of the verb. Who benefits from the car being sold? The person who it is being sold to. In that case, the direct object is el coche, or lo, and the indirect object is él or la, and in this case since both pronouns are present, se. The indirect object also tells you who the DO is going to, or for/to whom the DO is.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the verb refers to how many people are doing that action. In the example above, there may be only two people interacting with each other, since vender is in the second person singular, but se can also refer to more than one person, in which case you'd have to figure that out from the context of the rest of the conversation. The only person you have to worry about when considering the indirect object pronoun is whoever is receiving the action. So try not to worry about counting the person doing the action because it has nothing to do with how you translate the pronouns.

Now in the case of a sentence that has people interacting with each other but no object receiving an action, then you would only have an indirect object because an indirect object is always a person, never a thing.

Does that make it a little clearer?


smile heart

This.

I'd really rather not tell him because I just don't want to deal with this kind of crap. People either take a tact of neutrality or decide that the victim is lying because it's apparently too painful to believe that a close friend could do that.

Yanno, never mind how ******** painful it is for me to lose friends because of something someone else did to me.

Yes, I'm bitter.

Justifiably so. I'm sorry. <3