German Pronouns — Personal, Reflexive, Possessive and Relative

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Pronouns stand in for nouns, and like nouns they carry a case. You use them in almost every sentence you speak, which means an error here is far more visible than one in a rarer structure. This guide covers the four groups that cause the most trouble.

Personal pronouns

The case comes from the verb or the preposition, exactly as it would for a noun. Ich sehe ihn is accusative because sehen takes a direct object; ich helfe ihm is dative because helfen governs the dative.

The formal Sie is always capitalised, in every case. That capital is the only thing distinguishing it from sie meaning she or they.

Reflexive pronouns: mich or mir?

This is the one worth learning properly, because the rule is exact and the error is common.

Ich wasche mich. — Nothing else is being washed. Accusative.
Ich wasche mir die Hände. — die Hände is the direct object, so the reflexive moves to the dative.

The same pattern runs through a whole family of everyday sentences: ich putze mir die Zähne, ich ziehe mir eine Jacke an, ich kaufe mir ein Buch.

Possessive determiners

Two decisions at once. The stem says whose; the ending says which case. The endings are the same as for ein and kein.

The stems are in the last column of the personal pronoun table above. Whichever one you need, the endings below are the same.

euer drops its second e when an ending is added: euer Zimmer, but eure Zimmer and euren Vorschlägen.

Standing alone without a noun, a possessive takes the der/die/das endings instead: Ist das dein Buch? — Nein, das ist meins.

Relative pronouns

The rule people get wrong: gender and number come from the noun the clause refers back to, but the case comes from the relative clause itself. Look at what the verb inside the clause needs.

Der Mann, der dort steht — subject of steht, so nominative.
Der Mann, den ich sehe — direct object of sehen, so accusative.
Der Mann, dem ich helfe — helfen takes the dative.

The genitive forms mean whose: der Mann, dessen Auto vor der Tür steht. If a preposition is involved it comes first and sets the case: das Projekt, an dem wir arbeiten.

da-Wörter: damit or mit ihm?

When a preposition points at a thing, German merges the two into one word — da- plus the preposition, with an r inserted if the preposition begins with a vowel. When it points at a person, the preposition keeps a normal pronoun.

Ich warte auf den Bus → Ich warte darauf.
Ich warte auf meinen Bruder → Ich warte auf ihn.

English uses for it and for him in the same shape, which is exactly why this is easy to get wrong. Animals are usually treated as things.

Other pronouns worth knowing

man is the impersonal subject — man kann hier nicht rauchen — and exists only in the nominative. In the other cases it borrows from ein: einen in the accusative, einem in the dative.

dieser, welcher, jeder and keiner all follow the der/die/das endings.