An Easy Guide To French Indirect Object Pronouns

If you want to make sentences in French without endlessly repeating nouns, you need to learn how to use pronouns to replace them.

And when it comes to object pronouns, there are two main types – direct and indirect. 

I’ve already covered direct object pronouns in another post, – so in this post, I delve into the topic of indirect object pronouns French to reveal all their secrets!

What Are Indirect Object Pronouns French?

If you’ve seen my post about direct object pronouns in French, you’ll already know what French pronouns and object pronouns are. But if you haven’t read that post, let’s start with a reminder.

Pronouns are words that replace nouns or noun phrases in sentences, and object pronouns are words like “me”, “him” or “it” that replace the noun serving as the object of the sentence.

Look at this example:

• The girl threw the ball
• She threw it

In the first sentence, “the girl” is the subject of the sentence (the person or thing doing the action), and “the ball” is the object of the sentence (the person or thing receiving the action).

In the second sentence, we then replace “the girl” and “the ball” with the subject and object pronouns “she” and “it” respectively.

We usually do this when a subject or object has already been mentioned or is otherwise known to us so we don’t end up repeating, for example, “the girl” or “the ball” every time we speak.

However, in this pair of sentences, “the ball” and “it” are direct objects because the girl does the action directly to them: she throws the ball/it.

But now look at this example:

• The girl threw the ball to her dad
• The girl threw the ball to him

In these sentences, along with the direct object, we also have an indirect object. In the first version we say the girl threw the ball to her dad – here, “to her dad” is the indirect object pronoun because she doesn’t do the action to him directly.

In the second version, we then replace “to her dad” with “to him” – “to him” is the indirect object pronoun.

Note that in English, you can often spot an indirect object because it is accompanied by “to” or sometimes other prepositions like “for”.

This is not always the case, though, because you can also say things like “she threw her dad the ball”. However, in sentences like this, “her dad” is still an indirect object – even without “to” – because he still receives the action indirectly. I’ll come back to this again later in the post.

Indirect Object Pronouns French

In English, the direct object pronouns are “me”, “you”, “him”, “her”, “it”, “us” and “they” – and the indirect object pronouns are the same except that, depending on the word order, we sometimes also add “to” or other prepositions, as explained above.

However, in French, in the third person singular and plural, the indirect object pronouns are different from the direct object pronouns – and this is one reason why it’s important to know the difference.

Here they are in full:

• me (to me)
• te (to you [singular informal])
• lui (to him, to her, to it)
• nous (to us)
• vous (to you [singular formal, plural formal or informal])
• leur (to them)

As you can see, for the third person singular, there is only one indirect object pronoun, lui. This word is used regardless of whether the object referred to is masculine or feminine and whether it is a person or a thing.

The same is true for the third person plural – in French, the only indirect object pronoun for “to them” is leur, regardless of whether you are talking about masculine or feminine nouns and whether they are people or things.

Te is used to address individual people you are on informal terms with. Vous is used for individual people you are on formal or informal terms with and for two or more people, either in formal or informal situations.

Before a vowel or unaspirated “h”, me and te become m’ and t’ respectively.

How Do Indirect Object Pronouns French Work In Sentences?

French indirect object pronouns differ from English indirect object pronouns in that the word order is slightly different in French and that the idea of “to” or “for” is included in the pronoun itself, so there’s no need for a French preposition.

When the object of a sentence is a full noun, French follows the same basic subject-verb-object sentence structure as English. However, when object pronouns are used, they are placed before the verb instead of after it.

Let’s look at some different sentences to see how to use indirect object pronouns in French

• Simple tenses

With simple tenses – in other words, those that don’t include auxiliary verbs like “to have” or “to be” – the indirect object pronoun is placed directly before the verb, like this:

• J’envoie une lettre à Paul →Je lui envoie une lettre
  • I send Paul a letter (I send a letter to Paul) →I send him a letter (I send a letter to him)

• J’envoie une lettre à Paul et à Claire → Je leur envoie une lettre
  • I send a letter to Paul and Claire →I send a letter to them

• Je te montrerai ma nouvelle voiture
  • I will show you my new car

• Ils nous donnaient des cadeaux de Noël chaque année
  • They gave us Christmas presents every year

Note that in the first example, I gave both the English translation with “to “ and the one without – but after that, I just included one translation. However, remember that in English, both versions are possible.

• Negative sentences

With negative sentences, the rule that the indirect pronoun comes directly before the verb is still true, which means the ne is placed before the pronoun. Here are some examples:

• Il ne m’envoie plus de messages
  • He doesn’t send me messages anymore

• Pourquoi tu ne me passes pas le téléphone ?
  • Why don’t you pass me the telephone?

• Nous ne leur parlions pas autrefois
  • We didn’t used to speak to them 

• Elle ne lui prêtera pas son vélo demain
  • She won’t lend her bicycle to him tomorrow

• With infinitives

When a sentence includes an infinitive, the indirect object pronoun usually comes after the first verb and before the infinitive, like this:

• Je vais t’expliquer plus tard ce qu’il s’est passé
  • I’m going to explain to you later what happened

• Ils veulent lui répondre
  • They want to reply to him

• Ce n’est pas la peine de leur proposer un dîner parce qu’ils n’accepteront pas
  • It’s not worth proposing (suggesting) a dinner to them because they won’t accept

• Compound tenses

When you use a direct object pronoun with a compound tense (those that require auxiliary verbs, like “to have” or “to be” e.g the French past tense), there’s a complication since you need to make the past participle agree with the pronoun in terms of number and French word gender.

However, with indirect objects, this rule doesn’t apply, so you don’t need to worry about it. You only need to think about agreement when your sentence also includes a direct object pronoun, something I cover below.

This is good news since agreement with direct object pronouns is quite a tricky bit of grammar to get to grips with. But when you have an indirect object pronoun and no direct object pronoun, things are quite easy.

Here are some examples:

• Je t’ai envoyé une photo
  • I sent you a photo

• Ils lui avaient déjà donné la permission
  • They had already given him permission

• Nous leur aurons déjà parlé de ton problème avant la semaine prochaine
  • We will already have spoken to them about your problem before next week

• Il ne m’a pas encore demandé 
  • He hasn’t asked me yet

• Reflexive verbs

Sometimes, the indirect object of a sentence can be the same person or thing as the subject, and to express this in English, we use indirect object pronouns like “to myself” or “to themselves”.

When this happens in French, most of the indirect object pronouns are the same as the “normal” ones – but lui and leur both change to se. (Se changes to s’ before a vowel or an unaspirated “h”.)

Otherwise, it’s all very simple, and sentences like these follow the same rules as before. Here are some examples.

• Je m’enverrai un email pour ne pas oublier
  • I’ll send myself an email so I don’t forget

• Elle s’est promis de ne plus fumer
  • She promised herself to not smoke anymore

• Il se parle tout seul tout le temps quand il n’y a personne
  • He speaks to himself all the time when nobody’s there

• Ils sont en train de se demander à quelle heure il va arriver
  • They’re wondering what time he’s going to arrive*

*In French, se demander, literally “to ask oneself”, means “to wonder”.

How Do Indirect Object Pronouns Work With Direct Ones?

So far, I’ve avoided giving examples of sentences that contain both direct and indirect object pronouns, but of course, it’s possible to find both together in the same sentence.

When pronouns occur together in sentences, there is a strict order that must be followed, and in most grammar books, you will find a table that summarises this. 

The table also includes the pronouns y and en, which I’ve dealt with in another post. I’ll include the full table here so you can see how it all works.

Here’s the table:

This table tells us that when you have more than one pronoun in the same sentence, those in the first column come before those in the second column, those in the second column come before those in the third – and so on, with the pronoun en coming last.

So now let’s have a look at some examples to see how it works in practice – the indirect objects are highlighted in bold:

• Elle le lui a lancé
  • She threw it to him

• Ils me l’ont promis
  • They promised (it) to me

• Je vais te le donner cet après-midi
  • I’m going to give it to you this afternoon

What’s interesting here is that the indirect object pronoun is sometimes placed before the direct object pronoun and sometimes after it, depending on which pronouns are present in the sentence – as dictated by the table.

In the first example, the indirect object pronoun lui (to him) is placed after the direct object pronoun le (it).

However, in the second example, the indirect object pronoun me (to me) is placed before the direct object pronoun le (it).

In the third example, te (to you) is the indirect object – and it is placed before the direct object le (it) because, according to the table, that’s where it must go.

This might all seem a little confusing at first, and at the beginning, you may find yourself referring to the table or picturing it in your mind as you try to construct sentences.

This won’t last, though, because it will quickly become second nature as you follow the rules of StoryLearning and read books in French.

And before long, you will instinctively know the correct order of object pronouns in sentences without having to consciously think about it.

Agreement

There’s one other thing to remember when including direct object pronouns in sentences with indirect object pronouns and that’s agreement – as I’ve already mentioned.

When using compound tenses like the perfect tense, if a direct object precedes the verb in a sentence, the past participle needs to agree with that direct object in number and gender.

However, past participles don’t need to agree with indirect object pronouns and so are unaffected by them.

Look at these sentences:

• Elle lui a lancé le ballon
  • She threw him the ball

• Elle le lui a lancé
  • She threw it to him

• Elle lui a lancé la balle
  • She threw him the ball

• Elle la lui a lancée
  • She threw it to him

As you can see, in the first pair of sentences, le ballon is masculine and so is replaced by the direct object le – and because it is masculine, lancé doesn’t need to change to agree.

In the second version, on the other hand, la balle is feminine and so is replaced by the direct object pronoun la – and when this happens, the past participle needs to change to lancée to agree because the direct object pronoun precedes the verb in the sentence.

(In French, un ballon refers to a larger, inflatable ball like a football while une balle refers to a smaller ball like a tennis ball.)

The main point to understand from this example is that it is the direct object pronoun that causes this to happen and not the indirect object pronoun – because no agreement is necessary with indirect object pronouns.

I won’t go into this in further detail here since this is more to do with direct object pronouns than indirect ones, but it’s important to be aware of how sentences like this function when direct and indirect object pronouns occur together.

However, if you want to learn more about this, you can check out my post about direct object pronouns for more info.

Identifying When To Use Indirect Objects

One of the keys to using object pronouns properly is learning how to distinguish between direct and indirect objects, so let’s look at this now.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, in English, if you see “to”, it gives you a big clue that the object is indirect – but “to” is not always present, depending on the word order.

However, a test you can do to work out if you are looking at an indirect object is to rearrange the sentence to see if adding “to” (or potentially another preposition like “for”) makes sense. Here are two examples:

• I gave John the ball
• I gave the ball to John

• I gave you the ball
• I gave the ball to you

In the first version of each of these pairs of sentences, there is no “to”, but by rearranging the words and adding “to”, the second version of the sentence is still correct, so you know that “John” and “you” are indirect objects.

An example using “for” could be “I bought you a ball”. You can change this to “I bought a ball for you”, which tells you that “you” is an indirect object.

French works in a similar way because verbs that take indirect objects usually include à before the object. Here’s an example:

• Donner (quelque chose) à quelqu’un
  • To give (something) to someone

With sentences like this, since you have à, you can tell that you are dealing with an indirect object. So when you make a sentence with an object pronoun, you know that it needs to be an indirect object pronoun, like this:

• Je lui donne mon numéro de téléphone
  • I give him my telephone number/I give my telephone number to him

Here, because donner (to give) takes an indirect object, we need to use the indirect object pronoun lui and not the direct object pronoun le to make a correct sentence.

Confusion Between English And French

One of the most common mistakes that learners make when it comes to indirect object pronouns stems from the fact that not all verbs that take indirect objects in English take indirect objects in French and vice versa.

In the example above with donner, it’s easy because in English we say “give (something) to somebody”, and in French, the equivalent is donner quelque chose à quelqu’un, which is essentially the same.

However, look at the following example:

• J’apprends à Bill à parler l’esperanto
  • I teach Bill to speak Esperanto

The French verb apprendre can mean both “to teach” and “to learn”, but when it is used to mean “to teach”, it takes an indirect object, which is why we say j’apprends à Bill.

However, in English, “to teach” takes a direct object – we say “I teach Bill”, not “I teach to Bill”.

This means that while an English speaker might be tempted to say *je l’apprends, the correct sentence should be like this:

• Je lui apprends à parler l’esperanto
  • I teach him to speak Esperanto

(Note here that the second à in the sentence is used with the infinitive and belongs to a different part of French grammar – so don’t worry if you don’t understand why it’s there because it’s nothing to do with indirect objects.)

There are many examples of verbs like this, so let’s look at a few more examples.

• demander à (to ask)
  • Je vais demander à Hélène de venir → Je vais lui demander de venir
    • I’m going to ask Hélène to come → I’m going to ask her to come

• plaire à (to please)
  • Sa nouvelle école ne lui plaît pas
    • He doesn’t like his new school (literally, “his new school doesn’t please him”)

• manquer à (to miss)
  • Il me manque beaucoup
    • I miss him a lot*

• ressembler à (to look like)
  • Elle ressemble à sa mère → Elle lui ressemble 
    • She looks like her mother →She looks like her

• dire (to tell)
  • J’ai dit à Céline d’arrêter → Je lui ai dit d’arrêter
    • I told Céline to stop → told her to stop

• permettre (to permit, allow)
  • Je ne peux pas leur permettre de partir sans dire au revoir
    • I can’t allow them to leave without saying goodbye 

There are quite a few more of these, so you need to be aware of this rule and try to remember the verbs that take an indirect object in French but not in English.

The best way to do this is to make a mental note of verbs that behave this way as you meet them and then get used to using them through practice rather than trying to memorise a list.

Perhaps the good news here is that a lot of object pronouns are the same whether they are direct or indirect, so you won’t always make mistakes if you forget because the words don’t change.

However, in some cases – for example, when using third person pronouns or with past participle agreement – what you should say changes, so it’s best to try to understand the difference between direct and indirect object pronouns to help you avoid making mistakes.

*Manquer à quelqu’un (to miss someone) is something of a special case because it seems back to front compared to English, which makes it easy to get confused.

In French, tu me manques means “I miss you” (the literal meaning can be understood as something like “you are missing to me”).

As a result, if you want to say “I miss you”, tu me manques is the way to say it – don’t say je te manque by mistake – because this means “you miss me”!

Indirect Object Pronouns French FAQ

A Slightly Tricky Topic – But One You Can Master By Reading

Using direct and indirect object pronouns in French is largely relatively simple, but it does contain one or two aspects that are undeniably a little tricky at the beginning.

However, my advice is not to get too bogged down by complicated grammar explanations but rather to learn this grammar naturally through practice, and particularly by reading in French.

As you read you'll see the different types of object pronouns over and over again. That way, you'll quickly find you are able to make sentences using both types of object pronoun using the correct word order without ever having to think about it too much.

Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.