Adventures in Pronouns
'con yo', 'que mi', and other pronoun mistakes
English speakers are notorious for mixing up their pronoun forms. I often hear things like "her and
her brother are going to the mall" and "he plays better than me". Also, people who try to correct
common pronoun errors tend to hypercorrect such mistakes by making different grammatical errors.
People often say things like "He went to lunch with Julie and I". This makes me cringe every time I
hear it. He couldn't have gone to lunch with 'I', but could have gone to lunch
with 'me'.
These pronoun mistakes run rampant in English, but many people don't know that Spanish speakers
can also make similar mistakes. While in Costa Rica, I have heard heard mistakes with subject
pronouns mistakenly placed after pronouns. Although this is an error usually confined to the
developing language of children, some people never get such things corrected. For exmaple, I have
heard adults say things like 'con yo' instead of saying the standard 'conmigo'.
There are also other examples in which nearly the opposite occurs. Spanish speakers in rural Costa
Rica sometimes use the first person pronoun that is used after prepositions 'mí' when
they are supposed to use the subject pronoun 'yo'. For example, to say 'he plays tennis
better than I do', instead of saying the standard 'juega tenis mejor que yo', you may hear
'él juega tenis mejor que mí'.
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