Lesson 10: Possessives

How would you say, "This is mine," or, "Don't touch that, it's his!"?  You can only say sentences like these with the use of possessives.

Just to clear things up a little, possessives are all the words that say that something belongs to someone, like "mine," "his," "theirs," and so on.  They do not include the verb "to have."  That will be for a later lesson.

In English, possessives can be quite confusing, since the word "me," when changed to the possessive (mine) looks almost nothing the original!  Even weirder is that there is a completely different rule for each pronoun.  So you can't say "theine" for the possessive of "they."

Thank goodness it's much easier in Chinese.  Are you ready for it?  All you do is you use your pronoun followed by the character 的 (de5).  There's got to be more to it.  It can't possibly be that easy.  Nope, that's just about it.  Ready for some examples?

这是我的猫。

zhe4 shi4 wo3 de5 mao1

This is my cat.

狗是他的。

gou3 shi4 ta1 de5

The dog is his.

这是我家。

zhe4 shi4 wo3 jia1

This is my family.

Notice something strange?  There is no 的 (de5) in this sentence!  What happened?  Whenever you want to talk about family, you don't use the word 的 (de5).  You just skip it.  If you were to say 这是我的家 (zhe4 shi4 wo3 de5 jia1), it would mean this is my house (house and family are the same word).  So just remember that whenever you want to talk about family, you need to omit that word.  Here's another example:

她是我妹妹。

zhe4 shi4 wo3 mei3 mei5

She is my younger sister.

Does that make sense?  If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments.  I hope that was helpful!