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El estudiante le pidió más información al bibliotecario.

El estudiante le pidió más información al bibliotecario.
The student asked the librarian for more information.
From Lesson 127:Polite requests (¿podrías...? / ¿podría...?)·Spanish (Latin America)

Questions & Answers about El estudiante le pidió más información al bibliotecario.

Why is the verb pidió used here instead of preguntó for "asked"?
In Spanish, there are two different verbs for "to ask". You use preguntar when you are asking a question to find something out, but you use pedir (here in the past tense as pidió) when you are requesting an object, a favor, or a resource like más información.
Why do we need the word le before the verb if we already say al bibliotecario at the end?
This is a common pattern in Spanish called indirect object duplication. When you state who receives the action (the indirect object, al bibliotecario), you almost always include the matching pronoun (le) before the conjugated verb as well. It feels repetitive to English speakers, but it sounds completely natural and is expected in Spanish.
Why does el bibliotecario change to al bibliotecario?
The word al is a mandatory contraction of the preposition a (to) and the masculine article el (the). Because the librarian is the person the student is directing the request to, we must put a before the noun. Whenever a is followed directly by el, they merge into al.
I remember pedir has a stem change in the present tense. Does it change in the past tense too?
Yes, pedir has a stem change in the preterite (simple past) tense, but only for the third-person forms (he/she/you formal, and they/you all). That is why the "e" changes to an "i" for the student (pidió), even though "I asked" would just be pedí without a change.
How does this sentence relate to using podría to make polite requests?
If we were quoting the student's exact words, they probably used the polite conditional form you are currently learning, like ¿Podría darme más información? (Could you give me more information?). However, our example sentence is just narrating what happened in the past, so it uses the past tense of pedir (to ask for) instead of quoting the student directly.

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