It’s also about the tone you’re trying to adopt, and sometimes even a touch of politics for example, it was kind of a Hippie thing to use du with everyone as a statement of egalitarian values. It can be about the setting, too: sometimes the same two people will address each other with Sie in the office and du in the bar after work. It’s also polite to use it with anyone in a service position, like waiters, clerks or salespeople.Īfter that, it’s largely a matter of familiarity and age – both the absolute age of the person you’re talking to (older people are more likely to expect Sie), and their age relative to yours. However, it’s still important to use Sie with police officers (in Germany this is actually the law) and other authority figures. Like most “proper” forms of address (“sir/ma’am” in English, vous in French) it’s no longer used in every situation where the teachers and textbooks suggest that it is. When to use the Sie form rather than du or ihr is one of the most common questions for German learners, and there's no simple answer. Indeed, saying "der Hund meiner" instead of "mein Hund" would be just as awkward as saying "the dog of me” in English. We've included them mainly because they give you the stems of the possessive articles ( mein, dein, sein, etc.) that are used instead (see II.3). The genitive forms (last row) are grayed out because they're almost never used. These “Sie” forms share the same conjugation as the third person plural, but are capitalized. German adds a formal “you” (Sie), which is both singular and plural.German has a second person plural (ihr) that’s different from the singular (du) English uses "you" for both, except in casual/regional plurals like “y’all” or “you guys.".Old English did have this distinction, but even by the time of Chaucer it was gone (e.g. German pronouns often distinguish between the accusative and the dative case, while English pronouns never do.Here are the personal pronouns in English, which hopefully look familiar:Īs you can see from the table below, German pronouns are a little more complicated. But this time it should be slightly more familiar, as English has kept some of these distinctions too. Hope that helps someone.Like articles and adjectives, pronouns in German vary according to gender and case. I just checked and German is like English not like Hebrew and Greek in that it doesn’t combine the verb and pronoun into one word at least not in all situations. The verb is conjugated to tell if the verb action is “I did something” or “you did…one word carries all the information. I haven’t studied enough German lately to know if verbs are conjugated like in Hebrew and Greek. German is more like English that way with separate words not suffixes. Hebrew adds suffixes to nouns to tell you if it is mine, yours, hers, etc. It’s like building a house after seeing the plans–that pile of lumber makes more sense. I think that if you understand the structure or framework of a language it is then simply a matter of plugging in the different words. Greek has the N, G, D, A, & Vocative nouns cases the study of which makes German easier for me than it might have been without my study of Greek. Hebrew is a Semitic language (so are Arabic and Ethiopic to name two others) and it has M & F nouns. English is also an I-E language but doesn’t classify nouns as M, F, N.
Greek and German are Indo-European languages and both have M, F, N nouns. – This is their business.ĭas ist euer Auto. – This is your business.ĭas ist ihre Angelegenheit. – This is our business.ĭas ist eure Angelegenheit. – This is your plan.ĭie Angelegenheit (business) – feminine nounĭas ist unsere Angelegenheit. – This is his spoon.ĭas ist deine Tasche. – This is your spoon.ĭas ist sein Löffel. Following you can find some example sentences:ĭas ist dein Löffel. The forms in red are used when you refer to a feminine noun. The forms in blue and green are used when you refer to a masculine or neuter noun. Table: German possessive pronouns in the nominative case Let’s have a look at the different forms of German possessive pronouns in the nominative case. But what about possessive pronouns? Well, this is a little bit trickier because there are different forms for each person, depending on the case and gender of the noun you use. Memorizing German personal pronouns is easy. That is, when a speaker uses the word “I” in his or her statements we automatically know that this person is talking of him- or herself and not of one of us. The ability to change perspectives when we talk with one another is one of the most awesome characteristics of humans.
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