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Forum Rocket Spanish Spanish - Grammar Help with the following: "Ellos les encantó"

Help with the following: "Ellos les encantó"

monkey-butt

monkey-butt

I have an indirect/direct object question.

The sentence, "Ellos les encantó" is bothering me.  Someone was talking about how their boys loved the musical, Mary Poppins.

It was described as translating to "It pleased them" or "It was pleasing to them."  This has me totally confused. 

Is the musical the direct object?  Is it implied?  Wouldn't encantaron be the correct conjugation to agree with "Ellos"?

Any help is appreciated.



 
ricardo-rich

ricardo-rich

Hola Monkey- Butt,

The musical is the subject, "Ellos" the indirect object, the indirect object pronoun "les" refers to ellos. The verb encantar operates like gustar, almost always in the third person singular or plural. So the thing that has an effect becomes the subject and the person or people effected, the indirect object. Hope this helps.

Saludos,

Ricardo
monkey-butt

monkey-butt

Thanks, Ricardo.  That makes sense to me.  
Robert-C7

Robert-C7

Well, encantar and gustar both are said to be reverse construction verbs where the subject follows the verb.  What looks like should be the subject is actually the indirect object.  I searched the web for "spanish reverse construction verbs" and I found one of my posts on the subject:

https://www.rocketlanguages.com/your-community/spanish-grammar/reverse-construction-verbs-gustar

and a web page that discusses it as well:

http://spanishplus.tripod.com/ReverseConstruction.htm
 
monkey-butt

monkey-butt

That's great, Robert.  After Ricardo mentioned it acted like gustar, I found the following info on the backwards verbs.  

http://spanish411.net/Spanish-Using-Gustar.asp

Thanks for the additional link.  

Chris
the-hefay

the-hefay

One thing to remember is the rule, you need an "a" before the pronoun when using gustar type structure.

A ellos les encantó...
or simply
Les encantó... if the the "les" is already known from the context.

 

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