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I would like to understand how to you the word me and I in a sentence using correct grammar.

The difference between you and me : The difference between me and you The difference between you and I : The difference between me and I

Saul Chorro
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2 Answers2

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My wife is an elementary school teacher. Her “trick” for helping our daughters with this issue is to take the other person out of the sentence and see how it works.

For example, let’s consider the sentence, “You and me are talking with Jane." If you take “You and…” out of the sentence, you would have “Me are talking with Jane” or even “Me is talking with Jane” which should be obviously incorrect. So, this should be “You and I are talking with Jane.”

If you flip the example sentence around to “Jane is talking with you and me” and again take “you and…” out of the sentence, you would have “Jane is talking with me.” This would be correct as “Jane is talking with I” should be obviously incorrect.

Also as @davidlol mentioned, it is considered polite to put the other person first.

Formally, what you are asking about is the difference between nominative and objective pronouns. A nominative pronoun is typically the subject of the sentence. An objective pronoun is typically the object of the sentence or some other part of the sentence like a preposition. I thought Wikipedia’s entry for “English personal pronouns” offered a good explanation.

English personal pronouns. (2016, February 25). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 19:08, March 1, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=English_personal_pronouns&oldid=706829019

Dan Nugent
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  • The trick could really use an example to be honest. It'll put it in context and people who are not familiar with English grammatical lingo will also be able to learn from it :) – Terah Mar 01 '16 at 19:35
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Firstly it is polite and grammatically correct to mention the other person first so that rules out 'I and you' and 'me and you'.

It can help if unsure of the correct pronoun to use to imagine the same phrase applied to somebody else. We might talk of the difference between him and her, but we would not talk of the difference between he and she. So in that case we use the object form rather than the subject form.

In the same way we should not say 'the difference between you and I'.

The correct form is

The difference between you and me

davidlol
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