Everything Is Mine, Mine, Mine!
“No man can lose what he never had.” – Izaak Walton
You know that の can be added to nouns to make them “possessive,” so let’s see what happens when you add の to words like “I” or “you.”
In English, there’s a separate word for words like “my,” “your,” and “our.” If you think about it, though, grammatically, “I’s” should mean “My,” “You’s” should mean “Your,” and “We’s” should mean “Our.” Of course, that is not the case. In Japanese, however, it is the case. Let’s take a look. You should know the first two.
I (わたし)
You (あなた)
We (わたしたち)
The last one is a new word for you. It’s just “I” (わたし) with たち added onto it. わたしたち means “we,” and たち can be added to some other things as well, to make them plural (i.e. more than one thing). There’s a limit on what you can add it to, though, so don’t go throwing たち onto everything (usually pluralness is decided by context, not a grammatical indicator like たち in Japanese). For now, knowing わたしたち is good enough, and you’ll see a few more as you move forward.
At this point, we want to turn the words “I,” “You,” and “We” into “possessive words. We want to turn them into “My,” “Your,” and “Our.”
I → My
You → Your
We → Our
Based on what you’ve learned so far in this chapter, how would you turn these words into these other more possessive words?
I → Iの
You → Youの
We → Weの
Now, let’s replace everything with their Japanese equivalents.
わたし → わたしの
あなた → あなたの
わたしたち → わたしたちの
So, as you’ve discovered, the following words mean…
わたしの ＝ My
あなたの ＝ Your
わたしたちの ＝ Our
Okay, now that you know how to make regular nouns possessive, and you know how to say words like “my,” “your,” and “our,” it’s time to put these to practice. Let’s see how の works in a sentence.