The reflexive pronouns are used when in a sentence subject and object are the same person or if a noun is particularly emphasized. There is an own back-referring pronoun ("itself") only in the 3. Person. Otherwise, modified personal pronouns are used. The reflexive pronouns are used with reflexive time words.
- "The man / woman / child remembers yourself."
- "I wonder me. You wonder you. He / she / it wonders yourself."
- "We are ashamed us. You are ashamed you. You are ashamed to."
Welcome to language-easy.org! Now that you have decided to read this article, you are certainly ready to delve into the depths of German grammar. We are now dealing with a very important part of German grammar, the reflexive pronouns.
To understand the meaning of reflexive pronouns in German, you should just imagine that you are using yourselves brush your teeth. How do you express whose teeth you are brushing?? And it is at this point that the reflexive pronouns come into play.
To avert the danger of brushing other people’s teeth without meaning to, in this article we will first look at a brief description of this type of pronoun in German and illustrate the use of possessive pronouns in German with some examples.
But now let’s not waste any more time and get straight to the first point of this article. Let’s go!
What are reflexive pronouns in German?
First, we will try to define the reflexive pronouns of German. In the following description we want to emphasize especially the difference to the personal pronouns in German. Because of this similarity, you should remember the following description well.
The reflexive pronoun is a pronoun that differs from the personal pronoun in that it refers to units that are particularly close, usually in the same (partial) sentence.
The reflexive pronouns occur very often in the German language. They occur especially often in connection with certain verbs. These verbs can be used well to identify the subject or object of a sentence. This should give you an incentive to learn these kinds of pronouns well.
The reflexive pronouns in German
Now we come to the central part of this article, a table of reflexive pronouns in German. Of course, after this overview, let’s look at some examples of the use of these pronouns.
As mentioned earlier, let’s now take a look at some examples of the concrete use of reflexive pronouns in German. You will immediately notice that the structure of these sentences with reflexive pronouns is not particularly complicated.
- "I shave me."
- "You lay you towards."
- " He/she/it cares yourself to the man."
- "We relax us."
- "You shower you."
- "You are mistaken yourself."
The reflexive pronouns of the dative case in German
The reflexive pronouns you could see in the table are the so-called accusative reflexive pronouns. However, there is another type of these pronouns, namely the dative reflexive pronouns. Even if they do not occur as often as those in the table above, they are still an important part of German grammar.
Not all reflexive pronouns of the dative differ from those of the accusative. Only the 1. and 2. Person of the singular is affected by this. But see for yourself:
- " Me " becomes "To me"
- "You" becomes "You"
These reflexive pronouns of the dative case appear when both a direct and an indirect object occur in the sentence. You can see this well in the following example sentence, where one is the body part and the other is the shoe.
- "You pull dir the shoes on."
Some last words exercises
In this last part of the article on indirect speech, you can show again what you have learned. To do this, simply enter the correct answers in the following gap-filling text. With a click on the button "Correct" you will see the solutions and you can see immediately whether you need to practice or not. Well, I wish you good luck and goodbye!