59. German Singular Pronouns

59. German Singular Pronouns 

I said in the last post that German pronouns are a bit tricky for the English speaker and I should explain why. Let's construct a simple dialogue and show how this might be...

Johanna: Ich komme aus Deutschland [ ich kommer   ow ss   doy tch lunt]. Und du? [ooh nt  dooh].
Thomas:   Ich komme aus Australien [ow strah lee en]. Und Monika und Alex?
Johanna:   Monika? Sie kommt aus Österreich [ur stir  rye ch = Austria]. Alex, er kommt aus Kanada [cun ah dar].

When Johanna and Thomas talk about themselves they use the 1st person pronoun ich but when they address someone else they use the 2nd person pronoun du. When talking about people who are not there (Monika and Alex), they use the 3rd person pronouns er and sie. These two pronouns create problems for the English speaker and it relates to the nature of German nouns.

I mentioned previously that German nouns have gender. It is easy to understand that der Mann will use er as its pronoun but ANY WORD with der including objects such as der Computer will also use er.  So if I say the computer is fantastic. It is really good, I would say: der Computer ist phantastisch. Er ist wirklich gut [veerk lich gooht]. 

Feminine words, besides the obvious female words such as die Dame, will always use sie. Therefore we also have to use sie for an object such as die Lampe [dee lum per]. 

Equally many objects in German are neuter (das words) but at the same time so are some people. One such example is the word for the girl, das Mädchen. Technically, and I have seen it written in texts, the correct pronoun for the girl (she) is es. This is hard to understand from an English speaker's point of view where people are people and objects are objects. In conversation, it is very easy for the English speaker to slip up and refer to an object as 'es' when it is a der word or a die word. 

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