Personal pronouns
A personal pronoun is a word which stands in for a noun, usually for a person or thing:
Sara will bring a quiche. She will bring a quiche.
It can also replace a noun group or a whole phrase:
My neighbour’s house has been burgled. It has been burgled.
These are the personal pronouns in German:
| singular | plural | |||
| First person | ich | I | wir | we |
| Second person | du | you (informal) | ihr | you (informal) |
| Sie | you (formal) | Sie | you (formal) | |
| Third person | er | he | sie | they |
| sie | she | |||
| es | it |
As you probably already know, German has different modes for addressing people.
Use du/ihr for friends and children, and the polite Sie for people whom you do not know well and who are older than you.
Points to watch out for
The verb endings in German change in accordance with the subject. Here is a short summary of the endings for regular verbs.
ichــــــ e wirـــــــ en
duـــــــــ st ihrــــــــــــ t
Sieـــــــــــ en Sieــــــــ en
er/sie/esــــــ t sieـــــــــــ en
Spelling for ‘I’ and ‘you’
Note that ich ‘I’ in German is spelled with a lower-case i when it is not at the beginning of a sentence. The formal ‘you’ Sie on the other hand always takes an initial capital letter.
Sind Sie nicht Franz Beckenbauer? Aren’t you Franz Beckenbauer?
Pronouns in German use the grammatical gender
In German, third-person pronouns are used according to grammatical gender. This is different from English, where the use of the third-person pronouns is based on biological gender: ‘he’/‘she’ for people, and ‘it’ for things or concepts.
Masculine nouns
Note that masculine nouns are replaced by er, regardless of whether they are people, animals or things:
Der Mann ist schön → Er ist schön.
Der Hund ist schön. Er ist schön.
Feminine nouns
Feminine nouns are replaced by sie:
Die Frau ist schön. → Sie ist schön.
Die Brille ist schön. Sie ist schön.
Neuter nouns
Neuter nouns are replaced by es:
Das Kind ist schön. → Es ist schön.
Das Sofa ist schön. Es ist schön.
Pronouns change according to case
In addition, German is more complicated than English in that the personal pronouns can change when the case changes.
In English, this also happens in some of the pronouns when they are used as objects in the sentence.
I → me The man saw me yesterday.
he him I saw him yesterday.
she her We saw her yesterday.
we us You saw us yesterday.
they them You saw them yesterday.
In English, these are the only changes which occur in personal pronouns. All others stay the same regardless of whether you use them as a subject or as an object.
In German, almost all the pronouns change their form. They also have different forms depending on whether you are using them in the accusative or the dative.
For example, if the pronoun replaces a noun (phrase) which functions as the object of the sentence, the pronoun has to be in the appropriate case:
accusative dative
Wir sehen den Mann. Wir helfen dem Mann.
Wir sehen ihn. Wir helfen ihm.
