Personal Pronouns: אני, אתה, את, הוא, היא…

Ten words, and they are the first Hebrew anyone learns. Two of them will give you trouble for months, and neither is one you would predict from English: Hebrew has two different words for "you" in the singular, chosen by the gender of the person you are speaking to, and it has no word for "it" at all. Everything else on this page is straightforward.

The ten forms

The table is pointed for two concrete reasons. First, אַתְּ at "you (to a woman)" and אֶת et, the direct-object marker, are the same two letters unpointed — unrelated words doing unrelated jobs, separated only by the pointing or by the sentence around them. Second, אַתֶּם and אַתֶּן differ by a single final letter, and a beginner reading quickly will not see it.

The gendered "you", in one sentence

This is the single biggest structural difference between the Hebrew pronoun system and the English one, and it is worth naming here before you meet it a thousand times: אַתָּה goes to a man, אַתְּ goes to a woman, and every word in the clause that agrees with the addressee changes with it.

The whole chain — present, future, imperative, possessive — is drilled on אתה vs את. Do not postpone it: there is no gender-neutral way to address anyone in Hebrew.

Two forms you will read and not say

אָנוֹכִי anokhí is a second word for "I". It is all over the Hebrew Bible — it opens the Ten Commandments — and it is (archaic) in the modern language: recognise it when reading, and never produce it.

אָנוּ ánu is a second word for "we", and this one is genuinely alive — but only in (formal) written Hebrew: newspaper editorials, official letters, academic prose. Speech uses אנחנו. The two are compared on אנחנו vs אנו.

There is no "it"

Hebrew has no neuter gender, so it has no neuter pronoun. Every noun in the language is masculine or feminine, and referring back to one means saying הוא or היא — about a table, a train, a decision, a war. This is not a poetic personification; it is simply what the grammar has to work with.

Now the part that turns this from a fact into a difficulty. You cannot read a noun's gender off its plural ending. The endings ־ִים and ־וֹת look like a masculine/feminine pair and they are not reliable:

שולחן is masculine with a ־וֹת plural; שנה is feminine with a ־ִים plural. Both are everyday words and both point the wrong way. Gender is a property of the word, not of its ending and not of its meaning — the full account is on grammatical gender.

Three nouns get a warning rather than a rule. דרך, כוס and רוח are feminine in Modern Israeli usage — הדרך הארוכה, כוס קטנה — but older texts treat them either way, so you will occasionally meet a masculine adjective on one. Use the feminine, and build no intuitions on them.

A pronoun plus one more word is already a sentence

Hebrew has no present-tense verb "to be". So a pronoun followed by a noun or an adjective is not a fragment waiting for a verb — it is a complete, ordinary sentence, and the commonest sentence type in the language.

There is nothing missing from those sentences, and the reflex to insert a word between the two halves is the single most persistent English habit in beginner Hebrew. It has its own page: Hebrew has no 'am', 'is' or 'are'.

When the pronoun can go, and when it cannot

Hebrew is often described as a language that drops its subject pronouns. That is half true, and the half matters.

In the past and future, the verb ending names the person. גַּרְנוּ can only be we lived, so אנחנו adds nothing and Israelis leave it out as often as not:

In the present, nothing names the person: the Hebrew present is the בינוני participle, and a participle marks only gender and number. גרים fits we, you and they alike, so removing אנחנו does not shorten the sentence — it deletes the only word that said who:

So the licence is specific: first and second person, past and future. The reasoning and the shortcuts casual speech takes anyway are on dropping the subject pronoun and the בינוני.

Ten forms, but not ten equally live ones

Textbooks print the table as ten parallel cells. Spoken Israeli does not treat it that way, and you should know which cells are which before you decide what to drill.

אתם has absorbed אתן, and הם has absorbed הן. In ordinary speech Israelis use אתם to address a group of women and הם to talk about one. That is not sloppiness to be corrected out of you, and the grammatical literature registers it: Ur Shlonsky's description of Modern Hebrew prints the two feminine plurals in parentheses in its pronoun table, marking them as marginal for speech. They remain fully alive in (formal) writing, in teaching and in careful speech.

Both of those are good Hebrew. The full picture — including what happens to a mixed group, and where the agreement really breaks down — is on when Israelis break pronoun agreement.

Common Mistakes

1. Translating the English dummy "it". English needs a subject in every sentence and invents one when there is nothing to put there — it's cold, it's late, it's raining. Hebrew leaves the slot empty.

2. Using הוא as a neutral "it". English speakers reach for the masculine as the default when the referent is an object, exactly as they would use it. Hebrew has no default.

3. Swapping הוא and היא. This one is almost a cruel joke of the two languages: היא, the word for she, is pronounced like English he. Beginners map it by sound and produce the opposite of what they mean.

4. Using הן for a mixed group. Learners who have just discovered that Hebrew has a feminine plural over-apply it. הן requires every member of the group to be female; one man in the room and the pronoun is הם.

Key Takeaways

• The set is אני, אתה, את, הוא, היא, אנחנו, אתם, אתן, הם, הן. Two of them are "you" in the singular, chosen by the addressee's gender.
• אני and אנחנו carry no gender. The gender comes back on the verb the moment the sentence is in the present.
• Unpointed את is two words: the pronoun at and the object marker et. And אתם / אתן differ by one final letter.
• There is no "it". Every noun is הוא or היא, and the plural ending is no guide: שולחן is masculine with a ־ות plural, שנה is feminine with a ־ים plural.
• Pronoun + noun or adjective is a whole sentence — אני מורה, היא עייפה — because the present tense has no copula.
• The pronoun may be dropped in the first and second person of the past and future, where the ending names the person. It may not be dropped in the present, where nothing does.
• אתן and הן are marginal in speech and alive in formal writing: Israelis say אתם to a group of women, and that is the language, not an error. אנוכי is (archaic), and אנו is (formal) written Hebrew for אנחנו.