German/Lesson 8

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Grammatik 8-1 ~ Colors
yellow:  gelb blue:    blau red:     rot black:   schwarz white:   weiß orange:  orange pink:    pink violet:  lila cyan:    türkis brown:   braun grey:    grau light-grey: hellgrau dark-grey: dunkelgrau

Grammatik 8-2 ~ Possessive Adjectives, Pronouns, and the Genitive Case
Recall the following from Gespräch 3-1:


 * Karl: Ja. Und danach bringst du mich auf deinem Motorrad zu meiner Wohnung.

Which translates:
 * Carl: 'Yes. And after that take me on your motorcycle to my apartment'.

The sentence demonstrates two of the possessive adjectives. These are (singular) 'my', 'your', and 'his/her/its' in English and mein, dein, and sein/ihr/sein in German. Note that because these are adjectives, the word ending must reflect the case and gender of the noun being modified (see Grammatik 4-1 above).

In German, the genitive case correspond to the English possessive case or to the objective case proceeded by of to denote possession. If the possessive is not followed by a noun, it becomes a possessive pronoun (see Pronoun Tables).

The pattern in the case endings of the possessive adjectives is that seen in Lektion 4 for the word ein. We can generalize these endings as in the following table, where we can express plural endings because other so-called ein-words do have plurals:

The small group of words that take these endings (in addition to ein) includes the possessive adjectives and kein ("not any" or "no" in the sense of none).