French · Chapter 4 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
Reflexive verbs
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
French washes itself the hands
With a reflexive verb, body parts take the definite article and not a possessive, because the pronoun has already done the possessing. Je me lave les mains, il se brosse les dents, elle s'est cassé le bras. Je lave mes mains is grammatical and sounds wrong to every French ear.
Je me lave les mains.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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26-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end.
Lesson 8 of 13 in this chapter