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- When to use AL and when to us…
When to use AL and when to use DEL?
Struggling a little bit with when to use AL and when to use DEL. Take for example the following two sentences:
No veo al perro.
Camina cerca del caballo.
My guess is that AL is used when the verb is acting on the object and that DEL is used when there is no direct relationship?
13 Comments
Hi, Oddible. There's a grammatical elephant in the room that no one has noticed: the use of "del" here has nothing to do with the verb. Rather, it's because the preposition "cerca" carries the preposition "de" when it's followed by something else. E.g., "El caballo está cerca," but "Estoy cerca del caballo." Consider this: "Veo al caballo cerca del perro."
Per: if we don't use the "personal a", the two example sentences would be: "no veo el perro" and "camina cerca del caballo". I don't want to get too technical, but "ver" is a transitive verb; it requires a direct object. "Caminar" is intransitive; it cannot have a direct or indirect object. When a direct object is a person or is an animal and we have some feelings for that animal (as in a pet), we use the personal "a", so, in our example, "el" becomes "al". We don't use the personal "a" with prepositional objects.
CalvoViejo: Thank you for the grammatical explanation of the use of 'de' in the second sentence.
oddible: the word 'a' is appearantly filled with meanings, not all obvious to an english speaker; I found a summary of it's uses here: http://spanish.about.com/od/prepositions/a/a.htm