English Translation
He loves his school.
Why do we ened the "A "? “To him he loves his school?” Seems better to say Él le encanta “a” su escuela… ?
It isn’t a literal translation. Your proposal would make no sense for many reasons… anyway, this is the grammar:
‘a él’ = to him ← dative (redundant, used for contrast)
‘le’ = to him ← dative
‘encanta’ = pleases, delights ← the verb
‘su escuela’ = his school ← the subject
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To add onto what Daniel said:
This is a big difference in how sentences expressing what the subject likes or dislikes are built in Spanish and in English. You might have already seen “gustar”, and the same thing happens with, for example, “apetecer”. In English, in the three cases, the grammatical subject and the “semantic” subject match:
I love my school.
I like to sing.
I would like to have an ice cream
“I” is the important actor here in the meaning of the sentence and in how it is grammatically structured.
In Spanish, however, you’d have (the parts in parentheses can be added to add emphasis, but are not required for the sentence to be make sense):
(A mi) me encanta mi escuela.
(A mi) me gusta cantar.
(A mi) me apetece un helado.
Here, the main actor on the meaning side (me, I am the one how this is about), doesn’t match the grammatical main character (so the subject of the sentence).
One example in which English does kind of the same is in sentences such as:
The result pleases me.
As you can see, even if here I you are saying something you enjoy, the subject (so, the result) is what is doing the pleasing, not you.
Hope this helps
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