Indirect object pronouns are such a challenge for me. Because that last sentence would be, “Indirect objects me are such a challenge” in Spanish. The indirect object appears before the verb and direct object. My brain (specifically my syntactic parser) is not prepared to recognize an indirect object before a verb and direct object. So in my listening comprehension exercises I am cofusing indirect object pronouns as other parts of speech and then I end up confused. Object pronouns often look like articles. As an example, “La estoy mirando”. Since la is a feminine article that often appears at the beginning of a sentence, I immediately interpret it wrongly. The subsequent verb is the notification that it cannot be an article, but with that information I have to then make a decision regarding the nature of la. Thus I need to backtrack mentally which seems inefficient. But given the ambiguity of la there is no choice. That doesn’t happen in English (well, it’s rather rare as found in garden path sentences). If I see the in a sentence, then my brain knows the nature of the next word before getting to that word (it can only be a noun). Because my brain can anticipate future words in a sentence, it can parse them quicker. But I don’t see how that can be the case in Spanish in certain circumstances.
