Personal pronouns.
The Nominativ set

Eight words. Every German sentence with a subject uses one of them. These are the Nominativ personal pronouns: the words that stand in for a person or thing as the doer of the action.

For the bigger picture, including the Akkusativ and Dativ sets and how pronoun word order works: Pronomen. Words that replace nouns. For the words that show ownership: Possessive pronouns. Whose is it?

The eight pronouns

All eight are yellow in edupango. They are the subject. They are in the Nominativ.

Person	Pronoun	English
1st singular	ich	I
2nd singular	du	you (informal)
3rd singular masc.	er	he
3rd singular fem.	sie	she
3rd singular neut.	es	it
1st plural	wir	we
2nd plural	ihr	you all (informal)
3rd plural / formal	sie · Sie	they / you (formal)

The sie problem

One word, three meanings. This trips up almost every learner, and understandably so.

• sie (lowercase) with a singular verb = she. sie schläft (she is sleeping).
• sie (lowercase) with a plural verb = they. sie schlafen (they are sleeping).
• Sie (capitalized, always) = formal you, singular or plural. Sie schlafen (you are sleeping, polite).

Context and the verb form resolve the ambiguity. In writing, the capital S on Sie marks the formal form. In speech, context does the work.

Each pronoun in a sentence

• Ich lerneDeutsch. (I am learning German.)
• Du sprichst sehr gut. (You speak very well.)
• Er kommt morgen. (He is coming tomorrow.)
• Sie arbeitet in Berlin. (She works in Berlin.)
• Es regnet. (It is raining.)
• Wir gehen jetzt. (We are leaving now.)
• Ihr seid spät. (You are late.)
• Sie kommen um 8. (They are coming at 8.)

wer? is the Nominativ question

wer? means "who?" It asks for the subject. Whatever answers it is Nominativ: every single time, whether that answer is a noun (derHund) or one of these eight pronouns. If the answer is ich, du, er, sie, es, wir, ihr, or sie · Sie, you are in the Nominativ.

• wer schläft? → Er schläft. (Who is sleeping? He is.)
• wer kommt heute? → Wir kommen heute. (Who is coming? We are.)
• wer sprichtDeutsch? → Ich sprecheDeutsch. (Who speaks German? I do.)
• wer hat das gemacht? → Sie hat das gemacht. (Who did that? She did.)

How the wer? question works in full: wer? The Nominativ question word.

Why they matter for verb conjugation

Every German verb ending is determined by its subject pronoun. Learn these eight forms and you have the key to every conjugation table in the language. There is one set of endings for ich, one for du, one for er · sie · es, and so on. The pronoun and the ending are always a pair.

To see the pronouns in action with verb endings: Präsens. The default tense.