German-for-English-Speakers/nouns/reflexive-pronouns.md

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Reflexive Pronouns	German reflexive pronouns (myself, yourself, etc.) by case and person, and how they overlap with personal pronouns.	https://germanforenglishspeakers.com/nouns/reflexive-pronouns	2026-06-30

Reflexive Pronouns

Reflexive pronouns (myself, yourself, etc) are more common in German than in English, because there are many more verbs that require them. (Reflexive verbs will be covered in Section V.12.) By default, a reflexive pronoun is the direct or indirect object of a verb, so it can only take the accusative or dative case. As you can see, there's a great deal of overlap between the reflexive pronouns and the personal pronouns:

	1st sg	2nd sg	3rd sg	1st pl	2nd pl	3rd pl	Formal (Sie)
ACC	mich	dich	sich	uns	euch	sich	sich
DAT	mir	dir	sich	uns	euch	sich	sich
English	myself	yourself	him-/her-/itself	ourselves	yourselves	themselves	yourself/yourselves

By the way, those plural forms can also be used to mean "each other" or "one another." For example, "wir sehen uns" doesn't mean that we'll see ourselves, it means we'll see each other – or translating more idiomatically, "see you later."

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