Hello everyone,
and welcome to the very first part of the YourDailyGerman online course.
The goal of the first episodes is to work our way up to our first sentences quickly, but without rushing. We want to understand what we do at every step, right?
Now, in order to form a basic sentence in German, we need two elements:
- a verb
- a subject
You can think of it as motion and mass. A verb is motion if nothing “moves”, if nothing happens, then there’s no need to say anything. And we need something that actually “does” the motion – that’s the “mass”. The subject.
Anyway, so for a simple sentence we need a verb and a subject in some form.
The verb is WAY more interesting and there’s a lot more grammar to explore so we’ll save that for next time.
Today, we’ll start by meeting a group of words that we can use as subject – basic personal pronouns.
Basic personal pronouns are the words like I and you and the rest of the crew.
And today, we’ll get to know the German personal pronouns.
Ready?
The one that’s giving giving people a hard time often this weird “you all” because it’s not used that much in English. It’s the word when you’re a manager and you’re talking to your team and you say “You need to work overtime.”
You’ll probably find it confusing, but don’t worry about it too much. You actually don’t really need it as a beginner.
Cool.
So those are the German personal pronouns.
Now, you might be like “Sweet, I got it. Where’s the next lecture.”
But there are a few things you absolutely NEED TO KNOW about the pronouns, and about German in general.
ome really really awesome things (*I’m lying).
So don’t stop reading here.
German Pronouns and Noun Gender
German nouns have noun gender and are either der, die or das. Or sometimes two of them.
This will be a constant nuisance but most courses put too much focus on this and I do have a system for how to make this as easy as possible anyway.
That’s for another time though.
The reason noun gender matters for personal pronouns.
In English, we use she when we’re talking about a female person, he when we talk about a male person. That is the same in German.
The difference is about it. In English, when we refer to a thing like a table or a pizza, we use it.
In German, we have to use the pronoun that fits with the noun gender.
It’s der Tisch, so it would be er…. he.
And it’s die Pizza so it’s sie…. she.
We’d basically say this:
- I eat a pizza. She is tasty.
- Ich esse eine Pizza. Sie ist lecker.
If you’re not familiar with noun gender because you’re language doesn’t have it, then this must feel super weird and no amount of explaining can make that go away. It’s like writing with your weak hand. Feels awful, looks awful, takes forever. You just have to keep doing it and it’ll start feeling natural.
Using er and sie for things feels natural much faster than writing with your weak hand, though, don’t worry.
Now, if your mother tongue does have noun gender, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll have it easier.
Because noun gender is not consistent across languages.
The German sun is a bright, warm, life-giving, reliable woman – die Sonne.
And the moon is a pale, shy guy who often disappears for while – der Mond.
But in French and Spanish and many other language, it’s the other way around – the sun is a he and the moon is a she.
So if you speak Spanish or Russian for example, you’ll have to “relearn” a lot of noun gender.
Like I said though… do NOT stress about this as much as the typical beginner courses and apps will have you do.
Main takeaway for us today… a thing can and will be a he or she sometimes and you have to get used to it.
All right. So that’s the one thing we need to mention.
Here cometh the other one.
German has Cases
The second thing you need to be aware of is that there are 4 cases in German called Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Lala and Po.
Okay… that’s not really what they’re called, but we don’t really need the names now and you do not need to “get the cases right” in the beginning.
Think of them as different outfits. Each case has a function for example the business-case, the leisure-case and the party case. So whenever a thing or a person need to do business it will put on the business-case for example.
We’ll explore that later in the course.
What matters for us today is that the cases of course ALSO apply to personal pronouns.
The words we learned today – ich, du, er, sie and so on – are wearing the default dress, so to speak. Also called Nominative.
Nominative – Just do it.
It’s basically the thing they wear in the dictionary and also if they go and are the subject of a sentence.
But they each do have other suits.
- Er isst eine Pizza.
- He is eating a pizza.
- Ich sehe ihn
- I see him.
In the first example, he is the subject, doing the action of eating pizza. In the second example I’m the subject and “he” has the role of object. So “he” puts on the object-suit. Also in English.
In a way, the main difference between German and English is that English pronouns wear the same outfit most of the time, while German pronouns dress up regularly.
Anyway, there’s no point going knee-deep into cases in the first lesson. What matters is that there are versions of these pronouns that you’ll slowly see when we move to examples.
So let’s recap what we have learned so far. The personal pronouns in singular are:
- Ich, du, sie/er/es
The plural ones are:
- wir, ihr, sie
They are in case 1 so they are wearing their action-suit. The other suits might look similar in English and yet be different in German The words er, sie and es depend on the gender of the thing so they can’t simply be translated.
Now with these words we can move on to the verbs and then we already have enough material to build our first simple yet content delivering phrases.
Hope you enjoyed it and see you next time for … the verb.
Ich weiss nicht ob es jemand anders schon gesagt hat, aber es sol “Tinky Winky Dipsy, Lala and Po” sein. Nicht “Dispy.”
Upsi, danke :)!
sehr wichtig!
The southern U.S. contraction for ‘you all’ is ‘y’all’ (spoken – yall). “Y’all aren’t from around here, are you?”
German cases are often a tripping point for me, but the mental image of different cases wearing different suits….(I particularly like the lazy-suit example) make things a lot clearer. Vielen Dank!!!
Happy it helps!
‘Next’ button is broken :(
Should be fixed. Thanks for the headsup.
I’m going to need a native German’s opinion on this, when do we use the “Sie” article? I used to think (till 5 minutes ago) it was a sign of respect, but I was watching Zootopia in German dub, and Chief Bogo was adressing Judy Hopps with “Sie” whilst simultaneously (had to check the spelling on this one, too many vowels) ripping her a new one.
My guess now is that it could be a way to set boundaries, and boundaries could (and should) be respectful. What’s your take on the matter, Emanuel? //hands mic over
It’s not so much a sign of respect, but an acknowledgement of the “base” that the two of you have – a formal or professional or non-existing relationship. A boss can be very harsh to their employees but as long as it’s “Sie”, it doesn’t feel like “talking down” to the person. I would not mind getting torn a new one with “Sie”, but would hate it with “du” because it would feel like a boundary was crossed.
American movies and how their “you” is translated is actually a nice guide for when to use “du” vs “Sie”, although the movie choice tends to be “Sie” more often than in real life.
Does that help?
It does, yes. Danke.
This was a really great explanation, thank you!
Hiya! So this article on personal pronouns isn’t my first exposure to them as I’ve been attempting to get them ‘down’ for a good little while now. But I’m still just in the same predicament as I always have been. In terms of conjunction I know how it works and how to do it, just the ‘simple’ thing of remembering which endings go with which pronouns has seemed to be.. Honestly impossible for me.
Are there any tips, strategies or just anything I may not have tried to get my brain to remember these properly? Purely just what endings go with what pronouns.
Thanks!
Don’t try to memorize just the “endings”.
like… don’t do:
ich – e
du – st
…
Instead, take one verb, one basic one like “sagen” and then learn the forms.
– ich sag(e)
– du sagst
– er/sie/es sagt.
You can then just treat other verbs the same way.
Does that help a bit?
I’m a beginner and would like to speak German a lot better than I do
Heh! I’m just starting so what’s with the blurring of the text above the audio ‘start arrow’? I have to keep activating it to get the text to reappear. Is this a glitch or an intended feature forcing us to only listen and not also see the sentence being spoken? …. Just curious.
Oh, this is a glitch!
I added this blur option recently site-wide but that created some artifacts, which I’m currently cleaning up.
It should be fixed in this post now (text blur and play audio are separate from one another).
You’ll probably run into the same issue in other posts of the essentials, but I’m hoping to get that all cleaned up within a week.
at least 11 years old and still do the trick :)
Why are you talking about my Nokia?
Kidding… I do update the articles from time to time so the feel contemporary :)
This was most simplified explanation I have seen so far.
As a southerner, I love the translation of “ihr” as “you all”.
I was getting really excited by this brilliant approach to grammar. But then you went and said that the gender wasn’t really that important in the beginning. I disagree 100%. The entire grammatical system is built upon knowing and agreeing with the correct gender. Simply learn the artikel with noun. From the beginning.
Well, of course, if you want to do that, that’s great, but you need to realize that worrying about gender and cases all the time will heavily impede your speaking.
And it generally doesn’t matter for being understood. People often do gender practice when they actually should do some verb usage practice, because THAT’S what really makes their German unintelligeble.
100% agree!
Some languages skip personal pronouns and communicate the information in some other way.
All personal pronouns? Which languages?
Italian is a good example, or Bulgarian, but I think most languages skip them “at times” but use them for emphasis.
I’m not sure if there’s a language that actually doesn’t have them.
Oops, my comment was premature. Sie is handled at the end of the lecture, my bad.
In Dutch, there are two “yous”, i.e. “you” and “You” (actually there is only one “you in English).
The translation of the first is either “je” or “jij”, which are used in an informal setting. Then there are also “u” and “U”, which are used in a formal setting, of which “u” is most used. What I miss in the personal pronouns lineup is “Sie” to go with “u”, as in the following example”
Waar ga je naartoe?- Where are you going? – Wo gehst du hin?
Waar gaat u naartoe – Where are you going? – Wo gehen Sie hin? (not to be confused with “sie” in Wo gehen sie hin? or Where are they going?
The idea that there is only one form of you in English (with no distinction for singular/ plural or informal/formal) is such an interesting misconception. Because it’s really only true if you’re talking about standard English. On the other hand, if you look at how people use English, I’m unaware of any dialect of English which doesn’t in some way differentiate between singular and plural you. Some examples of plural forms of you include y’all/you-all, yous/youse, yez/yeez/yiz, you-uns/youns among others
I think “depend of” should be “depend on”.
Fixed it, danke :)
Minor typo: “If you’ve [sic] have studied”: s/you’ve/you/ (or just “If you’ve studied”)
Fixed, danke :)!
Unable to access the study material in Essentials although I am logged in as a member?
Should be fixed now :)
Thank you!
Hallo
This is the closest topic I found that relates to my queation:
When you saying something like ‘Das Kind ist ein Junge’, which gender do you use — das Kind’s neutral gender or der Junge’s masculine gender? Take this other example: ‘Charlie ist ein Kinde, oder um genau zu sein, ein Junge.’ I understand colloquially (and if you’re younger) you’d probably use biological gender regardless if its grammatically correct, but what would you use if you’re trying to be gramatically righr — the first noun’s gender or the second’s?
Maybe it depends on how its presented (like, if the 2nd noun is more of a throwaway comment (‘The kid – who, by the way, is a boy -….’ The fact he’s a boy isnt really important, so you’d just stick with the neutral gender ) , you’d stick with the original gender; otherwise if the 2nd noun is a more complete image or better suited for the topic, you’d use the 2nd noun’s gender (‘Charlie’s a boy – a /kid/ for Christ’s sake!’ — since his age is what the person has issue with, you’d use the neutral gender even though ‘das Kind’ appears after ‘der Junge’)) Or, maybe, its up to an individual’s preference as long as he’a consistent after the gender change (and now I am imagining German nouns joining LGBT xD. Regardless of what feelings about LGBT I may or may not have, I feel like LGBT is having /fun/ right now when it comes to a noun’s gender — despite the fact that gramatical genders have nothing to do with biological ones. Really, whoever came up with refering to them as grammatical genders should be brought to life so they can be tarred and feathered xD).
At first I wasn’t sure what you’re asking.
What gender do you use? Both of them, just as you did.
You can even do this:
I guess you’re referring to what pronoun you’d use in a FOLLOW UP sentence to refer back to the entity.
In that case, you’d go with what is the “closest” biological match, but it also depends on the context and flow of the text.
(“es” would sound wrong)
(“es” would sound a little weird here, because why then did you specify that it’s a boy right before if you’re not gonna roll with that)
Here, you’d definitely use “er” because the other two are just description, pretty much like adjectives.
To give you another example:
Here, you’d probably continue with “es” because “Lehrer” is just the function while “Einhorn” is the biological entity.
It’s definitely not up to personal preference though. All Germans would agree with my examples and that the other options would be weird, without really knowing why.
Yeah, thats what I meant — the pronouns. So, would this be right:
Well, okay, now you picked a special case in that example.
“der Verunfallte” has a female form, and the generic “person” is also feminine, so native speakers would here say
If you pick “der” then you’re suggesting it’s a male only to then switch over. That’s confusing.
And then the pronoun for “Mädchen”… “es” works, but I think 50% of people would stick with “sie” in this very case. Would be interesting what police would do in their formal reports.