Hi to everyone! Today I would like to share with you the latest challenge we as a group faced during our A1.2 course. We have learned two new topics in class – Possessivartikel and Personalpronomen. By themselves these topics do not seem to be very difficult, however, we have started to confuse these two things and in the end did not really understand when to use what, so we asked our teacher to explain us everything once more in detail, and he kindly agreed. This is what we have learned:

Since Possessivartikel is basically an article, it is not possible to use it by itself without a word that it is supposed to go with. For example, you can say “Sein Garten ist groß” (His garden is large). In this case, you have to specify exactly what you are talking about (garden) and you cannot leave this word out as it will be impossible to understand what you are talking about. Personalpronomen, on the contrary, is independent. Also, it is tricky because you always have to remember that you need to change Possessivartikel from Nominativ to Akkusativ case and Personalpronomen from Nominativ to Dativ case when the sentence includes more than one person or one object, for example: “Ich mag seinen Garten” (I like his garden, ‘seinen’ here is Possessivartikel in Akkusativ), or “Das Garten gefällt mir” (This garden is liked by me (literally), ‘mir’ here is Personalpronomen in Dativ). In both of these examples there is a person (me) and an object (garden) included, that is why we need to change cases.

All in all, German language is indeed quite tricky, full of surprises and details but it is definitely possible to clearly understand it once you really try to and give it some time and effort!

More posts to come, stay tuned!

Best wishes to all,

Anna