The role of personal pronouns


Personal pronouns are used to refer to people or things. They play the role of the subject in a sentence and can replace one or more persons. Pronouns must match the number, person and grammatical gender of the noun they replace.

Attention:

In German, you are not allowed to leave out a personal pronoun in a sentence! If you want to build a correct sentence, you must remember the person performing the action or replace it with a personal pronoun.

You can say:

Thomas ist ein sympatischer Junge.

Thomas is a nice boy.

or

Er ist ein sympatischer Junge.

He is a nice boy.

Without a personal pronoun or mentioning a specific person, the sentence is not built correctly. The exceptions are sentences with the impersonal construction man and nominal sentences (sentence without a finite verb).

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