Difference between "to" and "for"

To and for – E.S.L. To me(or would it be for me?), it means exactly the same thing, and i think a native English speaking person would understand both ways. But which one is the (most?) correct? Thanks in advance for your attention. Actually, I can think of few (or no) cases where an English sentence could have either to or for with no difference in meaning. In general, "to" most usually shows the equivalent of the indirect object, the person who receives the action. In your "to" sentences above, the saying or writing was directed to the person named. This is far the most common construction. In the "for" sentences that you gave, the object of for generally shows either a person who benefitted from the action, or else is shows that one person did it "as a proxy, a substitute, for someone else. >"He said it for me" -- = He said it for my benefit. (Maybe he knew that I really wanted for someone other than me to express that opinion.) >"She wrote for me" -- = She wrote it in my place. (Maybe my arm is in a cast, so I couldn't write, and as a favor, she wrote it for me. -- Another use of "for" is to show a purpose. Thus this sentence could also mean, "She wrote it for me to read", i.e. "She wrote it in order that I could read it. That is the meaning most similar to, but still quite distinct from, the straightforward meaning of "to". I'm curious; does Portuguese really use the same preposition for all these meanings of "for" in addition to the basic meaning of "to"? -- I'm not at all a linguist, but it is my understanding that most languages partition the various possible relationships differently among different prepositions. People tend first to think of their own language as being the "logical" one, but if you look carefully, you generally will see that each language is about as arbitrary as another; that doesn't make it any easier to learn how to use prepositions in another language, but it does explain why it is so difficult. What you can't do is substitute one-for-one a preposition in your language with a preposition in another language._________________ In Portuguese, TO and FOR have their own stand alone translations (PARA and POR) and they are used just as in English. However, in some cases, PARA may be used in place of POR, meaning the same thing or not, depends on the sentence, and it's quite normal for us to do so. That's why we, native Portuguese speakers (I'm from Brazil), sometimes get confused about the corret English translation for the preposition "PARA".I've searched for this topic in other forums as well and I realized that there are other language speakers in the world who have the same question, same doubt. I'm not sure, but I think they must use their prepositions just like we do in Portuguese, and maybe that's why they get confused too. The difference between the two can be explained as follows:1. "To" usually implies direction like: form Dan to Tim. In this sense "to" can also be replaced by "till/untill" from 7 to or till 8. This is the reason why "to" is part of the infinitive. "For" implies purpose that's why it can also mean "because": I apologize for being late: because I was late"I did it for you" is different from "I did it to you"I wrote to you (from me to you)I wrote it for you. (explains the reason or purpose)2. In collocations or phrasal verbs the differnce cannot be seen so easily. You have just to accept it.3. Sometimes the two are interchangeable without any important difference. "To" is often more idiomatic and formal than "for" as in some of the examples shown above.