French · Chapter 1 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer
Word order in French
Subject, verb, object - and the moments French bends the English order.
The short version
Je vois lui is the classic slip
French is SVO like English until the object becomes a pronoun, at which point it jumps in front of the conjugated verb. Je vois le livre, but je le vois. Affirmative commands push it back behind with a hyphen (donnez-le-moi), and with an infinitive it attaches there: je veux le voir.
Je le vois.
French cannot drop the subject pronoun
Spanish says como pan and means it; mange du pain is not a French sentence. The endings eroded until mange, manges and mangent all sound the same, so the pronoun carries the person instead. Every conjugated French verb needs its subject, every time.
Je mange du pain.
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