Breakdown of Le entregué el efectivo al cajero.
a
to
le
to him / to her / to you (formal)
entregar
to hand over, to deliver
el efectivo
the cash
el cajero
the ATM
Questions & Answers about Le entregué el efectivo al cajero.
Why is there a "u" in entregué? Shouldn't the past tense of entregar be "entregé"?
If you wrote entregé, the "g" would sound like an English "h" (because "g" before "e" or "i" makes a soft sound in Spanish). To keep the hard "g" sound from the infinitive entregar, you have to add a silent "u". This happens with all verbs ending in -gar when you use the yo (I) form in the preterite (past) tense: -gar changes to -gué.
Why do we need the pronoun Le at the beginning if we already say al cajero (to the cashier) at the end?
In Spanish, it is usually required to use an indirect object pronoun (like le, meaning "to him" or "to her") even when you explicitly name the person later in the sentence. It feels redundant in English (like saying "To him I handed the cash to the cashier"), but in Spanish, le acts as a necessary tag that points ahead to al cajero.
What is al short for in this sentence?
al is a mandatory contraction of the preposition a (to) and the article el (the). Whenever a is followed directly by el, they combine into al. So, al cajero means "to the cashier".
I've seen efectivo used to mean "effective". Does it also mean "cash"?
Yes, it depends on how it is used! When used as a noun with an article (el efectivo), it means "the cash" (physical money). When used as an adjective to describe something, it means "effective" (for example, un método efectivo means "an effective method"). In this sentence, because it has el in front of it, it's clearly the noun "cash".
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