You can already say je le lui donne. This lesson is about the cases where that competence runs out: two pronouns plus an infinitive, pronouns with the causative faire, the neuter le that stands for a whole clause, celui with its obligatory tail, soi, and the fixed verbs where y and en have stopped meaning anything at all.
None of it is hard. All of it is the kind of thing that, done wrong, makes fluent French sound assembled rather than spoken.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| me te se nous vous | le la les | lui leur | y | en |
Read the table left to right and you have the order. Two consequences catch everyone:
Third person reverses the intuition. Je le lui donne — not je lui le donne. But with a first or second person indirect object, the indirect comes first: Il me le donne. The rule is the column order, not the grammatical function.
Column 1 and column 3 never co-occur. You cannot say il me lui présente. French repairs this with a stressed pronoun: Il me présente à lui.
| French | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Je le lui ai dit. | zhuh luh lwee ay DEE | I told him/her so. |
| Il me l’a rendu. | eel muh lah rahn-DÜ | He gave it back to me. |
| Elle leur en a parlé. | el luhr ahn ah par-LAY | She spoke to them about it. |
| Il y en a trois. | eel yahn ah TRWAH | There are three of them. |
| Je m’en occupe. | zhuh mahn no-KÜP | I’ll deal with it. |
| Ne t’en fais pas. | nuh tahn fay PAH | Don’t worry about it. |
| Structure | Placement | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Simple tense | before the verb | Je le lui donne. |
| Compound tense | before the auxiliary | Je le lui ai donné. |
| Verb + infinitive | before the infinitive | Je vais le lui donner. |
| Negative | inside the ne… pas | Je ne le lui donne pas. |
| Positive imperative | after, hyphenated, direct first | Donne-le-lui ! |
| Negative imperative | normal order, before the verb | Ne le lui donne pas ! |
| Causative faire | before faire, not the infinitive | Je le lui fais lire. |
Donne-le-moi — direct object first, and me becomes moi. But make it negative and everything returns to normal: Ne me le donne pas.
With the causative, the pronouns attach to faire and never to the infinitive: Je les ai fait venir (and see lesson 7 — fait stays invariable there).
This le does not replace a noun. It replaces a clause, an adjective or a whole idea — and because it is not a noun, it never agrees.
Elle est malade ? — Je le sais.
Je te l’avais dit ! — I told you so.
Elles sont fatiguées, et elles le resteront. — invariable, though the subject is feminine plural.
Si vous le souhaitez… — if you wish (formal fixed use).
Compare Tu connais la réponse ? — Oui, je la connais (a noun) with Tu sais qu’il part ? — Oui, je le sais (a clause).
Celui, celle, ceux, celles always need a tail: de + noun, a relative pronoun, or -ci / -là.
| French | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| celui de mon frère | suh-lwee duh mohn FRAIR | my brother’s (one) |
| celle qui compte | sel kee KOHNT | the one that matters |
| ceux dont je parlais | suh dohn zhuh par-LAY | the ones I was talking about |
| celles-là | sel-LAH | those ones |
| ceux d’entre nous qui… | suh dahntr noo kee | those of us who… |
| celui-ci, celui-là | suh-lwee-SEE suh-lwee-LAH | the latter, the former |
Note the last line: in French, celui-ci = the latter (the nearer one) and celui-là = the former. English orders them the other way round in prose, which makes this a genuine reading trap.
Soi is the stressed pronoun for an indefinite subject — on, chacun, personne, tout le monde, or an infinitive.
Chacun pour soi. · On rentre chez soi. · Il faut avoir confiance en soi. · Cela va de soi.
With a definite subject you use lui, elle, eux: Paul est rentré chez lui — never chez soi here.
In these verbs the pronoun no longer refers to anything. Learn them whole; do not try to parse them.
| French | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| s’en aller | sahn ah-LAY | to leave — je m’en vais |
| s’y faire | see FAIR | to get used to it |
| s’en vouloir | sahn voo-LWAHR | to be cross with oneself |
| en vouloir à quelqu’un | ahn voo-lwahr ah kel-KUHN | to hold a grudge against someone |
| s’y connaître en | see ko-NETR ahn | to know a lot about |
| y être pour quelque chose | ee etr poor kel-kuh SHOHZ | to have something to do with it |
| n’en pouvoir plus | nahn poo-vwahr PLÜ | to be at the end of one’s tether |
| en avoir assez | ahn ah-vwahr ah-SAY | to have had enough |
| s’en tenir à | sahn tuh-NEER ah | to stick to |
| il en va de même | eel ahn vah duh MEM | the same goes for |
Take any page of a French novel and circle every y and en. Sort them into three piles: real pronouns with a traceable antecedent, fossilised verbs from the list above, and en as a partitive quantity. The proportions will surprise you — the fossils win.
Spoken French simplifies this system quietly. Lui and leur are frequently replaced by à lui / à eux after the verb, and clusters of three pronouns are avoided by restructuring. Il y en a reduces to y en a and often to yan-a. In careful speech and in all writing, the table above is followed exactly.
Québécois speech has two well-known features here. Y serves as a reduced form of lui and il(s) (j'y ai dit for je lui ai dit), which is stigmatised in writing but extremely common orally. And chez nous can mean chez moi — a first-person plural used for a single speaker's home, with no equivalent in France. Written Québécois follows the standard order without exception.
Rewrite with both pronouns in the right order.
1. Why is je lui le donne wrong?
2. In elles le resteront, why is le invariable?
3. Celui-ci in written French usually means: