I have struggled with this quite a bit, even as someone pretty advanced in English. It’s been explained to me many times, but nothing is making sense.
In: 35
When you went from one phrasing to the other, you actually changed two things at the same time, which muddies up which question you’re trying to ask:
1 – Changing which pronoun for [self]: “I” versus “me”.
2 – Changing the order of the two people being mentioned:
– (In the first one you said [other] before [self].)
– (in the second one you said [self] before [other].)
I don’t know if you’re trying to ask when you say “I” versus when you say “me”, or if you’re trying to ask when you say yourself first versus when you say yourself second.
I’ll address (1) first:
This is an actual *rule* in English. “I” is the pronoun for when [self] is in the *subject* of the sentence. “Me” is the pronoun for when [self] is in the *object* of the sentence:
“I gave a pencil to you.” (It wounds wrong to say “Me gave a pencil to you.”)
“You gave a pencil to me.” (It sounds wrong to say “You gave a pencil to I.”)
Now for (2):
There is a convention that if the subject or object is a set of more than one person, you put yourself last when listing that set. (“Mary and I”, or “Mary and Me”.) Putting yourself first sounds a bit off. (“I and Mary”, “Me and Mary”.) But it’s important to note that English speakers tend to care more about the “subject” paring order than the “object” pairing order. In other words getting the order right when using “I” seems to matter more than getting the order right when using “me”. You will hear people saying “Me and Mary” quite a bit more often than you will hear people saying, “I and Mary”. Both are technically wrong, but the one with “I” is more obviously wrong to all English speakers, and the one with “me” will slip by and seem okay to most. I don’t know why it matters more in the subject than the object, but it just seems to.
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