Language Course From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection Contents

person
, 
number
, and 
case
. You will be encountering all of the common 
German pronouns in the next several lessons, so we will track these as they appear. The following 

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familiar
personal pronouns are introduced in this lesson (
Lektion 1
):
ich
– I (1st person, singular, nominative case)
mich
– me (1st person, singular, accusative case)
mir
– me (1st person singular, dative case)
du
– you (2nd person, singular, nominative case)
dir
– you (2nd person singular, dative case)
er
– he (3rd person singular, nominative case)
sie
– she (3rd person singular, nominative case) 
es
– it (3rd person singular, nominative case)
Pronoun 
person
describes the relationship of the word to the speaker (that is, 
1st person
is the speaker; 
2nd person
is spoken to; and 
3rd person
is spoken about). Pronoun 
number
refers to whether the word 
represents one (
singular
) or more than one (
plural
) person or object. Finally, 
case
indicates how the 
pronoun is used in a sentence, as will be explained over the next several lessons. For now, note in the 
examples you have already encountered, the three cases of 1st person singular pronouns in German: 
ich
, 
mich
, and 
mir
. In English these are: 'I', 'me', and (
to
or 
with
) 'me' — in essence, there are really just 
two cases in English: subjective ('I') and objective ('me'). You will shortly see that there are similarities, 
yet distinct differences, in the cases as used by the English and German languages.