Kilo Lingo

Spanish · Chapter 14 · Lesson 12 · Grammar primer

Possessive pronouns

Prescribed by the AQA specification.

The short version

A friend of mine is un amigo mío

English says 'a friend of mine' and learners reach for un amigo de mí, which is not Spanish. The long possessive sits straight after the noun with no preposition at all: un amigo mío, una amiga tuya, unos vecinos nuestros. The same trick gives you 'that car of yours': ese coche tuyo.

un amigo mío

a friend of mine

El de él is the standard fix for su

Su and suyo cover five owners at once, so su casa could be his, hers, yours or theirs. When context does not settle it, native speakers swap the possessive for el de plus the explicit owner: la casa de ella, el de ustedes, el de Juan. This is not clumsy padding, it is the normal repair, and you will hear it constantly.

No es el mío, es el de ella.

It's not mine, it's hers.

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.

Read the full article · 5 min read

Practice

Practise this lesson

24-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 12 of 13 in this chapter

Back to the curriculum