Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to identify indirect objects in an Italian sentence and use the correct indirect object pronoun.

Lesson Explanation

Italian indirect object pronouns:

mi — to/for me       ci — to/for us
ti — to/for you       vi — to/for you all
gli — to/for him      le — to/for her
gli — to/for them (both genders, in modern usage)

Notice a genuinely useful overlap, mirroring Spanish: mi, ti, ci, vi are identical in both direct and indirect object systems. But Italian’s third-person forms are genuinely more distinctive: unlike Spanish’s single le/les, Italian distinguishes gli (him) from le (her) even in the indirect object — and in modern spoken Italian, gli has also absorbed the plural “to/for them” role, technically replacing the more formal loro.

Like direct object pronouns, indirect object pronouns go before a conjugated verb: Gli do il libro. (I give him the book.), Le do il libro. (I give her the book.)

The formal loro form, when used, is genuinely distinctive because it goes AFTER the verb rather than before it — the only indirect object pronoun with this reversed placement: Do il libro loro. (I give them the book — formal/literary register.)

Practice Questions