Russian Β· Chapter 2 Β· Lesson 13 Β· Grammar primer
Possessive pronouns
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification.
The short version
My agrees with the noun, not with you
Moy, moya, moyo and moi change to match the thing owned, whoever is speaking. A woman talking about her brother says moy brat; a man talking about his mother says moya mama. And papa ends in -a but names a man, so it is moy papa.
Eto moy papa.
Svoy is his own; yevo is someone else's
In the third person, Russian will not leave his ambiguous. Svoy points back to the subject of the clause, so on lyubit svoyu zhenu is his own wife. Swap in yevo and he loves another man's wife, which is a very different sentence.
On lyubit svoyu zhenu.
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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10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 16 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 13 of 16 in this chapter