Indirect object pronouns: me, te, lhe, nos, lhes

The receiver: me, te, lhe, nos, lhes

An indirect object is whoever ends up receiving something — a message, a coffee, an apology.

At the table and in the shop

• "Me passa o sal?" (Can you pass me the salt?)

• "Me vê um café, por favor." (Can I get a coffee, please?)

• "Me traz a conta?" (Can you bring me the bill?)

• "Você pode nos dar mais dez minutos?" (Can you give us ten more minutes?)

Sending and giving

• "Te mandei o endereço ontem." (I sent you the address yesterday.)

• "Ela nos trouxe um presente do Brasil." (She brought us a present from Brazil.)

• "Vou te dar o número dela." (I am going to give you her number.)

Telling and asking

Verbs that take a direct object, not a receiver

English slips a to in front of some of these; Portuguese does not. Ajudar, escutar, ver and chamar all take a direct object:

• ❌ "Lhe ajudo" → ✅ "Te ajudo" / "Ajudo você"

• ❌ "Lhe escuto" → ✅ "Te escuto"

lhe is a mystery guest

"Lhe dei o livro" can mean I gave the book to you, to him or to her — the pronoun itself tells you nothing. In writing the surrounding text rescues you; in conversation Brazilians simply name the person and skip the guessing game.

para mim — but para eu fazer

After a preposition, eu turns into mim and tu into ti: para mim, de mim, para ti. With com they fuse into a single word: comigo, contigo, conosco. Everything else — você, ele, ela, nós, vocês, eles — stays exactly as it is.

One thing overrides all of that: when the pronoun is the subject of a verb that follows, it stays eu.

Grammar books file lhe under to him / to her / to you (formal) — but across a good part of Brazil, and famously in the Northeast, lhe is simply how you say you. A study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing from the region found lhe already settled in there as a second-person form, and it never left: research on student speech in Sergipe counts lhe right beside te as an everyday way to address someone. So when a Bahian says Eu lhe amo, that is not formality — it is geography. Sources: ALFA: Revista de Linguística · Paraguaçu: Revista de Estudos Linguísticos e Literários.