Hey it’s Professor Dave, let’s talk about direct object pronouns.
As we’ve learned by now, Italian follows a grammatical structure that is more involved
than English.
Before we dive into direct object pronouns, let’s go over some basic grammatical terms
so that we know what we mean when we say things like direct object.
Pronouns, once again, are words that replace nouns, which is why we can say “it” or
“this” in the place of some object.
Personal pronouns replace people who are performing actions.
Instead of Maria eats the cake, we could say she eats the cake.
In this case, Maria and she are the subjects of their respective sentences.
A direct object is the recipient of the action described by the verb.
In this case that would be the cake, because Maria is eating.
But what is she eating?
The cake.
The cake is where the action of the verb eating falls.
In order to have a direct object pronoun in a sentence, we need a transitive verb.
In a transitive verb, the action moves from the subject to land on the direct object.
The subject performs the action, and the direct object receives the action directly, without
the help of any preposition.
Tomorrow I see Luigi.
I see whom?
I see him.
Subject, transitive verb, direct object pronoun.
These pronouns are quite simple in Italian because the pronoun “it” doesn’t exist.
Because all words in Italian have a gender, there will not be any apparent difference
when referring to an actual person, like Luigi, and something like a hat.
Let’s take a look at the pronouns now.
For the masculine singular, it’s lo.
When we replace the direct object, il gelato, with a direct object pronoun, we get io lo mangio.
These pronouns are used commonly when answering questions.
Let’s also go over the first and second person pronouns, as these are used commonly as well.
We know that to say the word I, we use io, when you yourself are the subject of the sentence.
I saw Jeff at the movies.
But if you are the direct object, you would say me, as in Jeff saw me at the movies.
So in Italian, the first person singular pronoun for a direct object is mi.
Second person singular is ti.
First person plural is ci.
And second person plural is vi.
These would be used in the following way.
We should note that when the verb is in the infinitive form, the pronoun will be attached
at the end.
In the presence of modal verbs, the pronoun can go before or after.
When the verb is not in the infinitive, direct object pronouns come before the verb.
With the word ecco, the pronoun is attached at the end.
There are a few more special cases that we will learn later, but for now let’s stick
with what we know and check comprehension.