As far as I know, all three of them mean "I." So whats the difference?
When should we use one over the other?

Thank you.

Hi Shiv,

It's true that they mean 'I' in English.  The difference is what comes after it changes the form of mai.N...I know you don't read Devanagari yet, but to help you get used to it I'll put it next to the romanization.  If you aren't seeing it correctly, go to your view menu and choose encoding, then Unicode (UTF 8).

mai.N (मैं) is the normal, unaltered form of "I".

When nouns in Hindi are followed by modifiers, called postpositions (in English we have prepositions), the noun is forced to change.  In the case of mai.N (मैं) it changes to mujh (मुझ).

Some of the common postpositions are me.N "in" (में), se "from, by" (से), ke "of" (के), and ko (को).  "ko" doesn't translate directly but generally indicates that something is directed towards the preceding noun.  

mujhmain (मुझ में) means "in me".  

mujhe (मुझे) is a special form of mujh ko (मुझ को), like a contraction.  So you could say either and they mean the same thing, namely that something is directed towards "I".  In your example from another post of being tired, the tiredness is directed towards you.  In English we would just say "I am tired", but your Hindi example is more "Tiredness has come to me".  

I hope that all makes sense!
Rachel

Oops!  Except that as Hamza pointed out, you would not need the "mujhe" with being tired...just "mai.N thak jaataa huu.N":-)

From: rm...@hotmail.com
To: hindi@googlegroups.com; hi...@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Hindi] Re: Difference between main, mujhmain, and mujhe
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:04:50 -0700

Hi Shiv,

It's true that they mean 'I' in English.  The difference is what comes after it changes the form of mai.N...I know you don't read Devanagari yet, but to help you get used to it I'll put it next to the romanization.  If you aren't seeing it correctly, go to your view menu and choose encoding, then Unicode (UTF 8).

mai.N (मैं) is the normal, unaltered form of "I".

When nouns in Hindi are followed by modifiers, called postpositions (in English we have prepositions), the noun is forced to change.  In the case of mai.N (मैं) it changes to mujh (मुझ).

Some of the common postpositions are me.N "in" (में), se "from, by" (से), ke "of" (के), and ko (को).  "ko" doesn't translate directly but generally indicates that something is directed towards the preceding noun.  

mujhmain (मुझ में) means "in me".  

mujhe (मुझे) is a special form of mujh ko (मुझ को), like a contraction.  So you could say either and they mean the same thing, namely that something is directed towards "I".  In your example from another post of being tired, the tiredness is directed towards you.  In English we would just say "I am tired", but your Hindi example is more "Tiredness has come to me".  

I hope that all makes sense!
Rachel