German · Chapter 8 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer

Indefinite pronouns

Prescribed by the AQA specification.

The short version

man has no object forms of its own

man is a subject-only word. The moment the same impersonal one needs to be an object, German borrows einen for the accusative and einem for the dative rather than inflecting man itself: Das macht einen müde, Das hilft einem.

Man sagt das oft. Das macht einen müde.

People often say that. That makes one tired.

jemand is one real person; man is people in general

Someone knocked at the door reports one actual, if unnamed, individual, so it needs jemand, not man. Save man for claims about people in general, with no specific individual in mind.

Jemand hat an der Tür geklopft.

Someone knocked at the door.

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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Practice

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10-question session

One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 15 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.

Lesson 3 of 13 in this chapter

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