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4.2 Use of prepositions

As long as we are not dealing with pronouns the issue is very clear and very much like English. Let's start with the genitivo, it's always important to see whose piece of cake we are talking about:

in English we say:

This is the car of my father. This is the window of my room.

in Spanish it is:

El coche de mi padre. La ventana de mi habitación.

The possession or the belonging of something is defined with the preposition de. Nothing spectacular so far!

As mentioned before the declension will be far more interesting when having a look at pronouns. But first things first. Let's have a look at the relation between objects when not dealing with pronouns:

		English	Spanish
	direct object (acusativo)	I see the dog	Yo veo el perro
	indirect object (dativo)	I give a gift to the woman. I give the woman a gift.	Yo regalo un libro a la mujer.

Again there is no difference between the English and the Spanish. As you see the indirect object is to be recognised by the preposition a.

As a summary we can see that as long as there are no pronouns the Spanish declension is quite easy. It is defined by preposition and the forms of the objects do not change in any way. Nice!

		english	spanish
	possessive form (genitivo)	The door of the house.	La puerta de la casa.
	direct object (acusativo)	I see the dog.	Yo veo el perro.
	indirect object (dativo)	I give a book to the woman.	Yo regalo un libro a la mujer.

The issue of direct and indirect objects of pronouns will be discussed in detail in chapter 4.5.


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