Wasabi - How to say “This is my …” in Japanese

Welcome to the next video and article series with tutor Naomi! In this article and video, Naomi explains how you can use the particle “の” to express that something belongs to you in Japanese. This is a very simple, but useful sentence structure used commonly in Japanese.

Table of Contents
[これ、それ、あれ]
[The Particle “の”]
[This is mine]
[How to say “Whose”]

[これ、それ、あれ]

First, we will give you a brief introduction to demonstrative pronouns in Japanese. There are other articles on Wasabi you can refer to for more details (here, and here), but since you will be using them for this lesson we will quickly explain them. Demonstrative pronouns are e.g. “This”, or “That” in English and they work nearly the same in Japanese. The three main demonstratives used in Japanese are “これ”, “それ”, & “あれ”. All of these translate to “this” or “that”, but which you need to use depends on where the object you are referring to is located.
これ： The object is closest to the speaker
それ： The object is closer to the listener
あれ： The object is far away from both the speaker and the listener

[The Particle “の”]

The particle “の” is among other things a particle indicating possession. When attached to a noun, it changes it to something like a genitive form in English. For example:

私

I, myself

私の...

Mine ..., my ...

With nouns other than “私” you can kind of imagine “の” to work like “ ‘ “ in English. For example:

なおみ先生

Teacher Naomi

なおみ先生の...

Teacher Naomi’s ...

[This is mine]

So, if you would like to say “This is mine”, or “This belongs to me”, you can combine what we just learned to form a proper sentence:

これは私のです。

This is mine.

If you want to specify the object of belonging, you can just place a second noun behind “の”:

これは私のメガネです。

These are my glasses.

[How to say “Whose”]

If you would like to ask who something belongs to, you can simply add “の” to “だれ”, which means “who” in Japanese, and then end your sentence with “か” to mark it as a question: これはだれのですか？ Whose is this? / Who does this belong to? Obviously you can also play around with the demonstratives depending on where the object you are talking about is located:

これはだれのですか？

それはだれのですか？

あれはだれのですか？

If you want to know more about the particle “の” you can check out more articles on the topic here, here, and here. That’s it for today. If you have any questions, you can always clear them up by booking a lesson with one of our native Japanese tutors. See you next time!

単語たんごリスト（Vocabulary list）

これ、それ、あれ	Demonstrative pronouns (this, that)
メガネ	Glasses
だれ	Who