This Spanish Medium Review quiz will give you the opportunity to revisit the direct object pronouns and how they work in Spanish. What is a direct object pronoun? A direct object pronoun is a word that is used in place of a noun that is directly affected by the action of a verb.
Direct object pronouns include the pronoun words of me, him, her, you, us, it and them. For example, take the sentence: He gave the shoes to me. Now, which word in that sentence is doing the action. That would be 'he' as 'he gave'. The word shoes is the subject of the sentence. Finally, 'me' is the direct object pronoun being acted upon.
If you remember from the Spanish Medium Review quiz titled The Indirect Object Pronouns, one way to determine whether a pronoun is being acted upon is to use the words 'to' or 'for' before it. Here, in this given sentence, the word 'to' comes before 'me' and that quickly tells you that 'me' is being acted upon.
Now let’s look at the Spanish word order for a direct object pronoun. As you can see from the sentence above, in English the direct object pronoun (me) is generally used after a verb just as the subject of shoes is. In Spanish, however, the direct object pronoun is generally used before the verb rather than after the verb. Therefore, in Spanish the above sentences would be said and written as: Él me dio los zapatos. (He to me gave the shoes.) It could also be translated as, He gave the shoes to me. You could say this as: Él dio los zapatos a me. However, that is an improper way of saying it as that is how it is said in Spanish. However, you would still be understood by native speakers. They would just know that you were not a native speaker.
Okay, let’s take another look at the direct object pronouns as follows.
ENGLISH | SPANISH | MEANING |
---|---|---|
me | me | me / to me / for me |
you | te | you / to you / for you (singular familiar), relates to tú |
it | lo | it (masculine) / you – relates to usted (masculine) (formal) |
him | le | him (note that in some Spanish countries they will also use 'lo' for 'him') |
her | la | her / it (feminine) / you – relates to usted (feminine) (formal) |
ENGLISH | SPANISH | MEANING |
---|---|---|
us | nos | us / to us / for us |
you | los | you – relates to ustedes when there are all males in the group |
you | las | you – relates to ustedes when there are all females in the group |
you | os | you - relates to vosotros / vosotras (familiar) |
them | los | them – related to ellos when there are males and females |
them | les | them – related to ellos when there are only males |
you | las | them – related to ellas |
With this information fresh in your mind, it is time to take the quiz. It contains ten sentences and in each sentence is an all capitalized word. From the Spanish answers given, locate the correct answer that will properly translate the given sentence using the proper direct object pronoun of the capitalized word.