As this error came up in a class with an advanced student, I thought I should give you a quick reminder of how to use the indirect object.

What’s an indirect object? Imagine a table with a large bottle of beer in the middle. Seated at that table are Stanley and Tim. Stanley cannot reach the beer, and he’d like a refill. He says

‘Tim, pass the beer!’

That is, Stanley asked Tim to pass the beer.

Who is asking whom? Stanley is asking Tim. What does Stanley want to happen? Stanley wants Tim to pass him the beer. This situation involves two players and two actions.

Now let’s see what happens if we make Tim disappear.

‘Stanley asked to pass the beer’.

Well, now the sentence has a completely new meaning. If you take out poor Tim, then the story behind this sentence is

‘Stanley wants permission to pick up the bottle and to pass it to someone else’.

This sentence is grammatically correctly, but pretty unlikely! (The real Stanley would keep the bottle near his glass!)

Let’s look at this again:

‘Stanley asked to pass the beer’ = ‘Stanley wants permission to pick up the bottle and to pass it to someone else’.

The moral of the story is that you need to be careful with verbs describing requests. It’s especially tricky when there are two verbs and there are two or more players.

Some other examples:

‘Stanley asked his lawyer to transfer the ownership of his house to his daughter.’

Who asks? Stanley. Who transfers the ownership? The lawyer.

Contrast this to

‘Stanley asked to transfer the ownership of his house to his daughter’.

Here, we have the same problem. Stanley now seems to be asking permission, not giving an instruction to anyone.

‘Stanley asked to transfer’ = ‘Stanley wants permission to transfer’.

So once again, we have two verbs (asking and transferring) and two players (Stanley and the lawyer). Because the subject or subjects are often assumed from the context in the Japanese language, native speakers of Japanese tend to forget that, in English, subjects and verbs are like beer and edamame. They have to be presented together in the right combination.