Stressed pronouns — moi toi lui elle

In one line

Whenever a pronoun follows a preposition, stands alone, or carries emphasis, you need the stressed form — because je and me cannot stand on their own.

The forms on this page

The table

Only four are genuinely new: moi toi lui eux. The rest are identical to the subject forms.

English has this category and you use it every day. "With me", "for him", "It's them", "taller than me" — English switches from I/he/they to me/him/them in precisely the same positions. So the idea needs no work at all. What differs is one boundary: English is drifting toward "It's me" and "than me" as normal (with prescriptivists insisting on "It is I"), while French settled the question centuries ago. C'est moi and plus grand que moi are simply correct — there is no formal alternative to worry about.

lui has two roles and this is confusing: it is both the indirect object pronoun (Je lui parle = I speak to him) and the masculine stressed form (avec lui = with him). Its position in the sentence tells you which.

Where it is needed — six places

And two uses that come up less often

Moi, je pense que… deserves its own note, because English cannot do it. French cannot stress a subject pronoun — je is too weak to carry emphasis — so it puts the stressed form out in front and repeats the subject: Moi, je pense…, Lui, il ne sait pas, Nous, on part demain. English gets the same effect with the voice alone: "I think…". Since French has no such option, this doubling is everywhere in speech, and using it is one of the quickest ways to sound less like a textbook.

soi — the pronoun used only with an indefinite subject

When the subject is on, chacun, tout le monde or an infinitive:

With a definite subject, soi is wrong: Il rentre chez lui, not chez soi

Examples

Common mistakes

Why French has two sets of pronouns