German Language Stack Exchange is a bilingual question and answer site for speakers of all levels who want to share and increase their knowledge of the German language. It's 100% free, no registration required.
Sign up to join this community
What’s the difference between using a definite article and a possessive pronoun to indicate actions (and possibly other things, if applicable)? For example, is there any difference between using die and seine in the following sentence:
Er sah auf seine linke Hand.
Where are the uses similar and where do they differ? Which is more common? What are the nuances of using each?
Really necessary is the possessive pronoun only, when other persons are on the scene for disambiguation - whose hand did he look at. (Dolls etc. could also qualify.) But there is no harm using it in the other cases too, actually I consider this as more naturally.
