# FR: They help him



## amanda764

Hi everyone.

The sentence I am trying to translate is 'they help him'. 'They' refers to educational films.
'Ils lui aident' is my attempt at translation, but french grammar is not my strong point...

[...]

Thanks in advance


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## Outsider

There probably is a better way to say it, so wait for further replies. Still, for the sake of grammatical correctness, I believe it should be _ils *l'*aident_, since "him" is a direct object in this case.


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## bieting2005

I agree with Outsider. I also believe the most literal translation of "they help him", which is in the present tense, is "ils l'aident." 

Here "l' " is an abbreviation for "le", which is the French equivalent of "him". While "lui" is normally used after a prepositon, for example, "chez lui (at his place)" or "pour lui (for him)". Besides, "lui" could be used independently to catch your attention, as "lui, il est acteur. (_literally _He, He is an acter.)"

Hope this explanation is of assistance.


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## amanda764

Brilliant, thanks a lot


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## XIII56

bieting2005 said:


> I agree with Outsider. I also believe the most literal translation of "they help him", which is in the present tense, is "ils l'aident."
> 
> Here "l' " is an abbreviation for "le", which is the French equivalent of "him". While "lui" is normally used after a prepositon, for example, "chez lui (at his place)" or "pour lui (for him)". Besides, "lui" could be used independently to catch your attention, as "lui, il est acteur. (_literally _He, He is an acter.)"
> 
> Hope this explanation is of assistance.


A complement :_ le_ = direct complement, _lui _= indirect complement
=> _ils l'aident_ (_aider _+ somebody) , _ils lui disent_ (_dire à_ + somebody)


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## bieting2005

Excellent, XIII!


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## berndf

bieting2005 said:


> Here "l' " is an abbreviation for "le", which is the French equivalent of "him". While "lui" is normally used





bieting2005 said:


> after a prepositon, for example, "chez lui (at his place)" or "pour lui (for him)". Besides, "lui" could be used independently to catch your attention, as "lui, il est acteur. (_literally _He, He is an acter.)"


This is yet a third form. French has three oblique forms of the personal pronoun: dative, accusative and isolate/prepositional. In singular, for the 1st person these three forms are _me, me, moi_; for the 2nd _te, te, toi_; and for the third _lui, le/la, lui_.


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## XIII56

berndf said:


> This is yet a third form. French has three oblique forms of the personal pronoun: dative, accusative and isolate/prepositional. In singular, for the 1st person these three forms are _me, me, moi_; for the 2nd _te, te, toi_; and for the third _lui, le/la, lui_.


Do you have an example for each form ? I admit we French people aren't very familiar with dative concept (except those who speak German or Latine fluently )


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## berndf

Those are the examples you gave. Dative is the case of the "complément indirect" and accusative is the case of the "complément direct". I just used a different terminology. As those are the only remnants of the Latin accusative and dative cases, it is not really useful in French to keep those terms except if you are doing historical comparisons or comparisons with other languages.


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## XIII56

Ok so the difference between dative and prepositional is that the first one is placed before the verb and the latter after the verb ?


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## Fred_C

Bonjour,
"dative" and "accusative" aren't called like this in French grammar.
There are two types of third person pronouns : 
"Conjunctive" and "disjunctive".
Disjunctive are used as emphasis when they are subject or direct object, after a preposition otherwise.
The disjunctive pronouns are "lui", "elle", "eux", "elles" (respectively masculine singular, feminine singular, masculine plural, and feminine plural.
The disjunctive pronouns take the same form whether they are subject or complement.
*Note : As a disjunctive pronoun, "lui" is always masculine.*

The conjunctive pronouns take different forms if they are subject or complements.
The conjunctive subject pronouns are "il, elle, ils, elles". (resp. sing mas, sing fem, plur masc, plur fem)
The conjunctive object pronouns are of two kinds :
Direct object (called accusative by our German friend Berndf) : "le, la, les, les"
Indirect object (called dative by berndf) "lui, lui, leur, leur"
_*Note : as a conjunctive indirect object pronoun, "lui" is either masculine or feminine.*_

An indirect object is usually introduced by the preposition "à".
(Je donne le livre _*à* ma mère_")
But if the indirect object is replaced by a conjunctive pronoun, this preposition disapperars : "Je _*lui*_ donne le livre".
If the indirect object is replaced by a disjuntive pronoun, the preposition remains : "Je donne le livre_ *à* elle_".


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## berndf

Yes. In the 3rd person. In the 1st and 2nd persons the prepositional forms (_moi, toi_) differ from the indirect object form (_me, te_).

Have a look here. This table shows the complete matrix of personal pronoun forms including nominative and reflexive forms which I omitted because they did not matter here as well as the plural forms. What I called "prepositional/isolate" is there called "disjunctive". There are more explanations about this form further down.

As a native speaker you obviously know all this but you are doing this intuitively and you probably never needed to bother systematizing it.


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## berndf

Fred_C said:


> "dative" and "accusative" aren't called like this in French grammar.


That is what I said in #9. This terminology is only useful for comparison purposes. I maybe should not have brought up these terms.


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## Fred_C

berndf said:


> As a native speaker you obviously know all this but you are doing this intuitively and you probably never needed to bother systematizing it.


Hi,
As a matter of fact, I learned to systematize this knowledge reading interesting posts by non-native speakers...


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