Demystifying Word Order in Spanish

Hey, everybody. In today's video, I'm going to be talking about word order in Spanish. In particular, the object-verb-subject, or OVS, order that sounds, well, completely backwards to us English speakers. Here's an example of what I'm talking about. In English, the sentence we're going to start with is, the owners paid the taxes. This is in subject-verb-object order, SVO, and this is the most commonly used word order in English, and this is what we like, right? Fortunately, it's also very common in Spanish, so we could translate this word-for-word in that order. We have the owners, los dueños. Paid, pagaron. The taxes, which is our object, los impuestos. Los dueños pagaron los impuestos. Subject-verb-object order, I love it. Super easy. But unfortunately, for us English speakers anyway, Spanish is a lot more flexible when it comes to word order, and you may see a sentence like this translated in object-verb-subject order, or OVS, which is completely opposite from SVO. Los impuestos los pagaron los dueños. Hmm. This literally says, the taxes then paid the owners. Definitely not a word-for-word translation, right? Oh, and in case you didn't notice, it picked up an extra los there just before pagaron. We have los impuestos and then los pagaron. You know, back when I was early in my Spanish learning journey, this particular word order sounded like something, you know, Yoda would say. Anyway, in this video, I'm going to be talking about that OVS order, that object-verb-subject, how they're structured, where the extra los came from in that example, and where you're going to see a lot of other words added, and most importantly, or at least equally important, why native speakers may use OVS over SVO in certain situations. I know this topic may sound really tough at first, but don't worry. It's like most things in Spanish. It's just a matter of learning the pattern. So let's start with that pattern, okay? Take a look at these three English sentences on the screen. The men painted the house. Juan found the money in the street. Maria threw away the flowers. These are all in SVO order, right? We have our subjects, the men, Juan, Maria. Our verbs, painted, found, threw away, and our object, right? Who's receiving the action? What was painted? The house. What did he find? The money. What did Maria throw away? The flowers. SVO. As I mentioned, SVO is very common in Spanish also, so we could translate these just like that. In fact, that's probably the most common translation you're going to hear, unless, you know, there's some other circumstances, which I'm going to talk about later. So these would be, Los hombres pintaron la casa. Juan encontró el dinero en la calle. Maria botó las flores. So easy, right? Let's look at these in OVS order. La casa la pintaron los hombres. El dinero lo encontró Juan en la calle. Las flores las botó Maria. Okay, these are all backwards, right? So we have our object stuck right up there in the beginning. What are the objects of these sentences like we talked about? House, money, flowers, right? La After our object, look what we have there. If you've studied object pronouns, you may have recognized those right away as direct object pronouns. They're referring to the object in these cases, right? La casa is a singular feminine noun, so the direct object pronoun would be la, so it's stuck in there. El dinero, singular masculine, it would be lo. And las flores is plural feminine, so it's las. This particular lesson is not about direct and indirect object pronouns. So if you have trouble with those, I have some videos on it. I'll include some links in the description section of this one. I encourage you to just binge watch them today. Also, if you're taking my course from Cero to Conversational, if you look at lessons seven through I think nine, I covered this exact same thing. So back to this construction, this is how our pattern is going to work. If we're talking about a specific object, in this case, we're talking about the house, the money, the flowers. It could be his house or my house. It might have a possessive pronoun, but we're talking about a specific object. We're going to be using object pronouns. Now, if we're talking about something that would need an indirect object pronoun like le, then that might be in there. But that's where this is going to go just before the verb, okay? But you're like, okay, why are they there, Paul? They need to be there. And you know what helped me wrap my head around this years ago? Because I kind of thought about it in English terms. And I'm like, well, we do have something similar. Like I could say, the house, the men painted it. The money, Juan found it in the street. The flowers, Maria threw them away. So I'm naming the object first, and I'm still doing an object pronoun. The flowers, Maria threw them away. Even though I'm not doing that voice inflection in Spanish, that's what helped me understand or wrap my head around this particular construction. Now, when we're saying them, we're not using that voice inflection, all right? We're just saying, I want you to take a look at that one where Juan found the money in the street, right? Lucky Juan. In that one, we use the verb, encontrar. Encontrar, which means to find. Now in Spanish, many times the pronominal form of encontrar, which would be encontrarse, is used to find something accidentally or unexpectedly, right? Which, that's probably how he found that money. Now, before I move on, I know I throw people off with that pronominal thing because now you're looking at the screen and saying, okay, Paul, I see encontrarse, which is reflexive, right? Not pronominal. I don't know that term. Here's what you need to remember. All reflexive verbs are pronominal, but not all pronominal verbs are reflexive. If you see any verb with se on it, they're all pronominal verbs like this. Reflexive verbs are verbs that actually reflect back on the person. So if you had lavar, to wash, lavarse is to wash oneself. In this case, the way I'm going to be using encontrarse, I'm going to be talking about finding something else, not finding myself. So it's not reflexive, but it is pronominal. So let's tweak our sentence to use the pronominal form of this, encontrarse instead of encontrar. First, let's just go easy, right? If we do go to OVS, we're going to put our object right up there in front. We know we're going to be using a direct object pronoun. Where's it going to go? Well, there is a word order with object pronouns. So it goes like this. You have your reflexive or pronominal pronouns first, then indirect object pronouns, and then direct object pronouns. So this one would be, El dinero se lo encontró Juan en la calle. In Spanish, you're often going to see indirect and direct object pronouns working together. Again, have some great videos on that. You'll find links in the description section. And when they do, we have to keep in mind that this is the word order, the one I just talked about. So take a look at this sentence. Pretty easy. I like that one. If we switch it to OVS, that got more complex, right? So now we have a se las instead of a le. I talk about in that video where that se comes from. Le becomes se when it's followed by a direct object pronoun. That's how it works. It's all about patterns. So let's talk about why a native speaker might opt for OVS over SVO. Well, there are three main reasons. And a big one is that in Spanish, the tendency is to put the most important information closest to the beginning of the sentence. By changing the word order, the speaker can emphasize the most important information. Here's our English sentence. Juan gave Maria the book. And I translated it three different ways, and all I did was flip the word order around. In the first one, Juan le dio el libro a Maria. The emphasis is on Juan giving the book to Maria. Our next one. A Maria le dio Juan el libro. The emphasis is on Maria receiving the book. And our last one. El libro se le dio Juan a Maria. The emphasis is on the book being the item given. That's what's important in that sentence. So you see, just changing the word order will tell the person listening what the speaker perceived to be the most important information. The second reason that you might see OVS over SVO is when it's used in poems and song lyrics to add, you know, that creative touch. Cuando caigo en depresión, mis problemas se los cuento. A la ventana del avión, el estrés me tiene enfermo. Take a look at the screen. Those are the lyrics you just heard. I'm going to focus on the part starting with mis problemas, my problems, right? Because this is where our OVS order starts. Mis problemas se los cuento a la ventana del avión, right? That is OVS order. What are we talking about? My problems. Is that a specific thing? Are we talking about specific problems? Yes, because it has a possessive pronoun. Mis problemas. So what comes after it, right? You have that se right there before los. Where is that se coming from? Well, it is not a pronominal verb, which we get used to that term yet. It's not that tough, right? It has nothing to do with that. This is back to our indirect object pronoun changing from a le to a se when it's followed by a direct object pronoun. Here it is los. So the le, right, that changes into a se, that's referring to I'm telling my problems to the window. That se is the to the window part. The los is referring to mis problemas. Now, I might have thrown you off that problemas ends with as. That's because it's one of the words that actually comes from the Greek, and they're very similar in English and Spanish, and they tend to end in M-A-P-A or T-A, so I like to call them ma-pa-ta words, and they're going to be masculine even though they end in a. You'll just have to learn them as you go, but you'll notice that they're very similar between English and Spanish. You know, they tend to be cognates. Here you can see problem right in there. Another example would be el planeta, the planet, right? Looks like planet. El enigma, the enigma. El mapa, the map. They're very similar. Let's move on to the third reason why a native Spanish speaker may prefer O-V-S over S-V-O, and this one, well, you may not like, but some verbs are just regularly used with this style, and it would sound very odd to use S-V-O with them. Chances are you're familiar with one. I'm sure if you've been studying Spanish for any length of time, and that and verbs just like it, like encantar, sometimes caer, to fall, depending on the meaning, but think of it as like verbs like gustar and encantar. You're always putting these in object-verb-subject order, right? To Maria, skiing is pleasing, right? The object is Maria. She's not the subject. She's right up there in front. You'll notice you have that le in there. What's that le? That is our object pronoun. This is an indirect object pronoun. There's our verb, gusta, and then our subject, esquiar, skiing, right? We're to ski. Another example, a Juan le encantan las fresas. What is the subject of the sentence? It's not Juan. Las fresas. It's right there at the end. The object is a Juan. He's stuck up there. There's an indirect object pronoun right after him. There's our verb, encantan, and our subject, way there at the end. With the exception of that third category where OVS is just the way that that's going to sound better, you often have some discretion there, right? You can play it safe and just stick to your SVO order, your subject-verb- object. Sometimes you may have to use, you know, those object pronouns, so really you'll have like subject-object-verb, but still, it's not too tough. The important thing is that you understand OVS when you see it, and as you start to understand the nuances of Spanish, you'll realize why people are using it, and you're like, huh, that's more important information there, or at least they're perceiving it that way. That's the stress of this message. Well, that's it for the video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, just do me a favor and give it a thumbs up, and until next time, hasta luego.