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).

	NOM.	ACC.	DAT.	POSS. PRON.
I, me	ich	mich	mir	mein
you	du	dich	dir	dein
he, him	er	ihn	ihm	sein
she, her	sie	sie	ihr	ihr
it	es	es	ihm	sein
we, us	wir	uns	uns	unser
you (all)	ihr	euch	euch	eurer
they, them	sie	sie	ihnen	ihr
you (formal)	Sie	Sie	Ihnen	Ihr

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:

	Ein-group Endings
	NOM.	ACC.	DAT.	GEN.
Masculine	--	--en	--em	--es
Feminine	--e	--e	--er	--er
Neuter	--	--	--em	--es
Plural	--e	--e	--en	--er

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).