Learn English – Using she or you to refer to someone “as a little girl”

pronouns

I read this somewhere and it said:

I still remember you as a little girl who overwaters plants because she doesn't know when to stop giving.

But in this sentence, the person says 'you' and 'little girl', but then uses 'she' as a third person.

Shouldn't it be:

I still remember you as a little girl who overwaters plants because you didn't know when to stop giving.

Best Answer

Both are nearly the same to me. The nuances are about perspective:

The sentence that uses "she" is talking about the "the little girl" from the memory, almost as if she was a different person than the woman in the present. You can use that phrasing to distance the two people. This is especially common when the speaker's view of the person has changed:

Before we started hanging out, I only knew you as the guy who came late to class everyday because he kept oversleeping.

The sentence that uses "you" links the person in the memory with the actual person. There is no distancing.

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