It’s Professor Dave, let’s check out double object pronouns.
Many students are literally terrified by the idea of double object pronouns, but as long
as we understand how to use both direct object pronouns and indirect object pronouns, there
shouldn’t be much of a problem.
If you’re forgotten how to use these, go back and check out those lessons now, otherwise,
let’s see what happens when we double them up.
First let’s recall our indirect pronouns.
How did we use these?
Here, the verb telefonare didn’t have an object.
Let’s change verbs and add one to see what happens.
But now we are going to learn a better way to do this.
We are going to shorten the sentence even further by using another pronoun in place
of the objects.
These are the direct object pronouns we already know, lo, la, li, and le.
Let’s learn a couple rules that must be followed when doubling up on pronouns like this.
First, when using double object pronouns, the indirect object always comes first, and
both pronouns will be placed in front of any conjugated verbs.
If the verb is in the infinitive, the pronouns will follow the verb instead.
When used with potere, dovere, or volere, they may precede or follow.
Next, lo and la may receive an apostrophe, if the verb that follows starts with a vowel,
but li and le never will.
And as a result of the doubling, a slight modification
of the indirect pronoun will occur, for better flow in pronunciation, where mi becomes me,
ti becomes te, ci becomes ce, and vi becomes ve.
We can now reply like a true Italian: Sì, te lo compro.
This literally means: Yes, to you, it, I buy.
The same thing will happen to all pronouns except for the third person singular and plural
which will modify into one word for all persons.
So looking at this chart, we can see first, second, and third person singular, followed
by the plural, and going across we see masculine and feminine singular, and then masculine
and feminine plural.
Going across for first person singular, there are no surprises, just change mi to me.
Notice that the two words stay separated.
For second person singular, it’s the forms we saw earlier, where ti becomes te.
For third person singular, these are the weird ones.
Notice here that they become one word.
Back to first person but now plural, we use ci, which becomes ce.
Here the words are separate.
Second person plural, vi becomes ve.
Again, the words are separate.
And third personal plural, it’s back to the same forms as for singular.
Now let’s see all of these pronouns in action.
So that’s how we use double pronouns.
Lastly, let’s mention that we can also combine the pronoun “ne” with direct object pronouns
to get a double pronoun.
For example, when you need to express a partitive, or when certain verbs require “ne”.
Let’s quickly look at some examples of this.
And one more application, remember si reflexive?
This can be combined as well, and it will modify into “se”, giving us se lo, se
la, se li, se le, and even se ne.
That may seem like a lot to remember, but this is exactly how Italians talk, so let’s
check comprehension.