German · Chapter 2 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
Personal pronouns: ich, mich, mir
Three cases turn one pronoun into three words, and getting mich and mir backwards is the fastest way to sound like a phrasebook.
The short version
The verb chooses mich or mir, not the meaning
English says me for both, so meaning cannot help you. Most verbs take the accusative mich, but a short list takes the dative mir: helfen, danken, gefallen, gehören, glauben. Learn that list as a group and the commonest pronoun mistake in German disappears.
Er sieht mich. Er hilft mir.
A German key is he and a door is she
German pronouns follow grammatical gender, not whether something is alive. A masculine noun becomes er, a feminine one sie, and only a neuter noun becomes es. Calling every object es is wrong more often than it is right.
Wo ist der Schlüssel? Er ist hier.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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Lesson 14 of 24 in this chapter