Sentence foundations
Build correct statements, questions, and negatives from the beginning.
äLeseLaut
Opening your grammar course…
Opening your grammar course…
144 lessons from A1 to C1. Follow a short story, understand the rules, explore the forms—then make them your own in practice.
Choose a topic, then put it into practice.
Build correct statements, questions, and negatives from the beginning.
Understand articles, noun gender, plurals, and the accusative.
Talk about ability, wishes, routines, requests, and instructions.
Connect simple ideas and locate events in daily life.
Introduce people and say who or what they are.
Personal pronouns let you refer to people and things without repeating their names. The verb sein—German for to be—is the most important irregular verb in the language and appears in introductions, descriptions, locations, professions, identities, and hundreds of everyday expressions.
Mia and Sam meet outside their language school.
I am Mia, and this is Sam.
The speaker uses ich bin; das pairs with ist. Both forms come from sein.
Choose the pronoun for the person or thing, then match sein to it. Formal Sie means “you” and always takes sind.
A subject pronoun tells us who or what the sentence is about. German normally states the subject explicitly: Ich bin müde. The form of the verb must agree with that subject.
Use ich for the speaker. Use du for one familiar person and ihr for two or more familiar people. Use formal Sie for one or several people when politeness, distance, or a professional situation requires it. Formal Sie is always capitalized.
The third-person pronouns er, sie, and es can refer to people, but they also replace nouns according to grammatical gender: der Tisch → er, die Lampe → sie, das Buch → es. This does not mean the object has a biological sex.
Notice the singular group bin–bist–ist and the plural group sind–seid–sind.
| Subject | sein | English | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| ich | bin | I am | Ich bin bereit. |
| du | bist | you are | Du bist pünktlich. |
| er / sie / es | ist | he / she / it is | Sie ist Ärztin. |
| wir | sind | we are | Wir sind hier. |
| ihr | seid | you are | Ihr seid nett. |
| sie / Sie | sind | they / you are | Sind Sie neu hier? |
Lowercase sie can mean she or they. The verb resolves the meaning: sie ist means she is, while sie sind means they are. Capitalized Sie means formal you and also takes sind.
sein is irregular: its forms do not come from one predictable stem. Learn the whole conjugation as a spoken sequence, then practise the forms inside complete sentences.
In a statement, the conjugated verb is normally the second sentence element: Ich bin heute müde. In a yes/no question, it moves to the front: Bist du müde? In a W-question, it follows the question word: Wo bist du?
Use du with one person you address informally. Use ihr when you address several people informally. Use Sie in formal or polite situations, regardless of whether you address one person or a group.
German speakers may explicitly offer the informal form with Wollen wir uns duzen? Until that happens, Sie is the safer choice in many professional or service situations.
Lowercase sie means she with ist and they with sind. Capitalized Sie means formal you and also uses sind. At the beginning of a sentence, capitalization alone cannot distinguish they from formal you, so context does the work.
Read the subject and verb together as one unit: sie ist, sie sind, Sie sind. This prevents translation word by word.
sein links the subject to information about identity or description. It does not express an action. German often omits the article before a profession after sein: Er ist Lehrer; Sie ist Ärztin.
For origin, use sein + aus. For location, use sein with a place expression. These chunks are immediately useful in introductions and everyday conversations.
Ich bin neu hier.
I am new here.
Noticeich → bin
Bist du müde?
Are you tired?
Noticedu → bist
Ich ist müde.
What would you change?