Possessive adjectives in the nominative

In English my stays my whatever comes after it: my brother, my sister, my room, my keys. Serbian is different. The words for my, your, our behave like adjectives, so they take an ending from the noun standing next to them.

That means every one of them is chosen in two steps. First you pick the word by the OWNER: moj if the thing is mine, tvoj if it is yours, naš if it is ours. Second you pick the ending by the THING OWNED, exactly the way an ordinary adjective agrees: masculine, feminine, neuter, plural.

• moj stan — my flat (stan is masculine)
• moja soba — my room (soba is feminine)
• moje kupatilo — my bathroom (kupatilo is neuter)
• moji ključevi — my keys (masculine plural)

The owner never changes across those four. Only the ending moves, and it moves with the noun.

The seven words

Watch the neuter. After moj, tvoj, naš, vaš it ends in -e: moje, tvoje, naše, vaše. After njegov, njen, njihov it ends in -o: njegovo, njeno, njihovo. One consequence: moje does double duty — it is the neuter singular AND the feminine plural (moje kupatilo, moje kuće) — while njegov keeps those two apart (njegovo kupatilo, njegove kuće).

His and hers: two things at once

njegov and njen are the pair that costs beginners points, because with them both ends of the phrase matter. The stem tells you who owns the thing, and the ending tells you what the thing is.

So njegova is not "her" just because it ends in -a. It is still his — the -a only tells you that a soba is feminine. In English the ending of the noun is invisible and the owner does all the work; in Serbian the work is split between the two ends of the phrase.

The owner does not have to be a person. Serbian has no separate word for its: it uses the same three words, picked by the GENDER of the owning noun. garaža is feminine, so its door is njena vrata; stan is masculine, so its window is njegov prozor.

vaš does double duty. It is your addressed to several people, and it is also the polite your to one person you are on formal terms with, the same way vi is the polite you. In letters it is often written with a capital: Vaša kuća.

You will later meet svoj, used when the owner is also the subject of the sentence. Ignore it for now — moj, tvoj, njegov... are correct everywhere at this stage.