German · Chapter 4 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
Possessives: mein, dein, sein
Mein behaves exactly like kein and ein, so having just met kein, one table quietly teaches you the rest.
The short version
Learn ein once and every possessive is free
Mein, dein, sein, ihr, unser, euer and Ihr all take exactly the endings ein already takes: meine, meinen, meinem, meiner. Cover the m in the mein table and you are reading the ein table. Learn the seven stems, bolt the ein endings on, and there is nothing else to memorise.
Ich suche meinen Schlüssel.
The owner picks sein or ihr, the noun picks the ending
A woman's things are ihr, a man's are sein, and that is all the owner decides. The ending comes from the thing owned, so a woman's father is ihr Vater with no -e, and a man's wife is seine Frau. Ask who owns it first, then what gender it is.
Sie liebt ihren Mann.
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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