French Possessive Adjectives For Beginners

Possessive adjectives are used to show who the owner of something is, or who it may be associated with.

 I can talk about my car or your dad. Obviously you do not own your dad in the same way I may own a car, but you get the idea.

Since we all have dads (or any object), it could get bit confusing trying to work out what we are talking about, a possessive adjective tells us exactly whose dad (or any object) we are talking about.

Possessive Adjectives In English

In English we have the following, which are the possessive adjectives:

• My
• Your
• His/her
• Its
• Our
• Their

When we use these, it does not matter what we are talking about or how many things, it can be one car or 100 cars it doesn’t matter. All that matters is who the owner is.

We just need to say the right possessive adjective and it all makes sense. It’s very straight forward in English.

Possessive Adjectives In French

In French it gets a little but more complicated. You need to think a little bit first.

Basically who owns the object does not matter. It’s the object itself which is the important part.

In French it’s pretty similar there is – My, Your, His/her/it, Our, Your, Their.

However, for each of these there is a male, female and plural version.

	Masculine	Feminine	Plural
My	Mon	Ma	Mes
Your	Ton	Ta	Tes
His, her, its	Son	Sa	Ses
Our	Notre	Notre	Nos
Your	Votre	Votre	Vos
their	Leur	Leur	Leurs

So it looks pretty complicated, but it’s really not.

There is just basically an extra step compared to England.

First you need to ask who owns the object, in the same way you would in English.

Let’s say we are talking about my pizza and my croissant.

So we know we need use “my”, which means we will be using “mon, ma or mes”

How we decide which one to use depends on the gender of the object. It does not matter who I am.

This is where mistakes are made and where we get confused as English speakers. I am man, so by default I think I need to be using ‘Mon’ for everything… This is wrong. It doesn’t matter about me. It matters about the object and its gender.

So let’s get back to my pizza and my croissant to see this in action. 

Pizza is a female word, so ‘my pizza’ would be – ma pizza.

Croissant is a male word, so ‘my croissant’ would be – mon croissant.

As you can see, both Ma and Mon are used here as the objects I am talking about, have different genders. It has nothing to do with me.

If I had more than one pizza or croissant (so I had plurals of them) they would both be Mes pizzas and Mes croissants. There is no male or female differentiation when it comes to plurals.

When you stop and think about who you are talking about and then what gender the object is it’s actually quite easy.

This is also another reason why I have said it is important to learn vocabulary along with its gender, as you can see here it is quite important for being able to say something as simple as “my” or “yours” in French. 

The Exceptions – Possessive Adjectives In French

This is French, so there are always exceptions to the rules.

The above system seems quite logical and easy to work out. However there is one exception

If you have a feminine object, but it is first letter is a vowel or an H, you can’t use the feminine version. You must the masculine.

For example: If I wanted to talk about “your aubergine” a feminine object… you would think it would be ‘Ta aubergine’ …but it is not.

The A from Ta going into the A of aubergine is too much for the French. They do not like this double vowel.

So to get around this, you must use the masculine form and it would become ‘Ton aubergine’

The same is true for “ma orange”.  The double vowel is not right, orange is a feminine word, but due it beginning with a vowel, it becomes “mon orange”

Luckily there is not that many words like this, but it is something you need to watch out for as it can be a very easy mistake to make.    

Conclusion

Getting possessive adjectives right can be little tricky at first, but you will soon get used to thinking about what one to pick and after a while you shouldn’t have any trouble.

Repetition is the key to mastering these. Any time you learn a new word you should practice saying it with my, your, his/hers etc to get used to using it.

So long as you always remember it is about the object and its gender, you can’t go wrong.

(Read the next lesson –French Adverbs)