Generic you

In German, the informal second-person singular personal pronoun du ("you")—just like in English—is sometimes used in the same sense as the indefinite pronoun man ("one").

In Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, these are also du and man.

In Dutch the informal second-person singular personal pronoun je ("you")—just like in English—is frequently used in the same sense as the indefinite pronoun men ("one").

In Russian, the second person is used for some impersonal constructions. Sometimes with the second-person singular pronoun ты, but often in the pronoun-dropped form. An example is the proverb за двумя зайцами погонишься, ни одного не поймаешь with the literal meaning "if you chase after two hares, you will not catch even one", or figuratively, "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush".

The second-person pronoun sinä can be used in Finnish to replace passive voice, largely due to the influence of (generic) you in English, but its use is only recommended in spoken or otherwise informal language.[3] A similar formation, though without the pronoun sinä and therefore only with the second-person possessive suffix -si, can be encountered in some dialects.

In Darija (Arabic as spoken in the Maghreb), there are two distinct singular second-person pronouns, one masculine (used when addressing a man) and one feminine (used when addressing a woman); but when used as generic pronouns, the speaker uses the pronoun with the gender corresponding to their own gender, rather than that of the person they are addressing.[4]

In Japanese, the sentence structure may be adjusted to make the patient of an action, or even the action itself, the topic of a sentence, thus avoiding the use of a pronoun altogether.