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Guided lesson A1 8 activities

Common possessive-pronoun slips

Ten minutes on the topic's own four common mistakes: његов reached for where the subject owns the thing itself and свој is required, његов used for a female possessor instead of њен, a lowercase ваш left where a formal capital Ваш belongs, and чија forced onto a masculine noun instead of чији. Build sentences around a relative and a neighbor, catching each slip in turn, before the unit's own listening and reading put the whole topic to work.

The rule
Prisvojne zamenice

The part of the grammar page this lesson drills — read it here, then use it.

Person-based possessives and agreement

Мој and твој decline exactly alike: мој/моја/моје and твој/твоја/твоје for masculine/feminine/neuter, моји/моје/моја and твоји/твоје/твоја in the plural. Наш and ваш follow the same pattern.

Његов (his/its), њен (her) and њихов (their) also decline like adjectives, agreeing with whatever is possessed: његов ауто, његова кућа, његово село (car/house/village) - the ending tracks the object, never the owner. Њен works the same way for a female possessor: њена кућа, њен ауто, њено писмо.

Addressing formally: ваш and Ваш

Exactly like ви/Ви in personal-pronouns-a1, ваш is capitalized Ваш when it formally addresses one respected person's possession: Ваш пасош, молим. (Your passport, please.) Lowercase ваш addresses more than one person, or one person informally.

Свој - the reflexive possessive

Use свој whenever the possessor is the same person as the subject of the clause, in any grammatical person - not only the third. Марко воли своју кућу. means Marko loves his own house; Марко воли његову кућу. would mean Marko loves some other man's house.

Свој declines exactly like мој/твој and, being reflexive, never has its own separate first- or second-person form - Ја читам своју књигу. (I'm reading my own book) is just as correct, and just as common, as using моју there.

Чији? - asking whose

Чији/чија/чије (whose) is the question word that possessive pronouns answer, and - like који/која/које in questions-a1 - it agrees with the gender and number of the thing possessed, not with whoever might own it.

Read the whole rule
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