“I hate those Swedish adjectives,” my friend proclaimed, “they make no sense!”
My friend has been studying Swedish for a few weeks already, and as she says, it’s been a slow going, painful process. The fact that she’s doing it mostly by herself, with only her Swedish boyfriend as a reluctant teacher, outside of Sweden, is not helping her efforts either.

This time it was the adjectives that incurred her wrath. She explained the problem to me, because apparently her Swedish guy was no help.
I know that she expected a clear, logical answer to her grammar question from me, but unfortunately, I had to disappoint her. All I could say was “well… that’s how it is in Swedish.”

And what made her so upset? This goofy, little thing that Swedish adjectives do when they’re stuck between a possessive word and a noun.

Take a look:
We say – min bil (my car) and ny bil (a new car), right?
So why do we get this when we put it all together?

• min nya bil – my new car

See what happened?
The adjective changes its form and gets the definite ending –a.

Why does it happen? I don’t know. It just does.

Here’s a few more examples:

• ditt hus – your house
• stort hus – a big house

but:

• ditt stora hus - your big house

It doesn’t matter if the possessive word is a pronoun or a noun. The adjective still changes.

• pojkens mormor – boy’s grandmother
• fattig mormor – poor grandmother

but:

• pojkens fattiga mormor – boy’s poor grandmother

So, in conclusion:
1.    If you have an adjective following a possessive word and preceding a noun, the adjective must be in the definite form ending in –a.
2.    There’s no other way but to learn and remember this rule.
3.    No need to get upset about it.
4.    Because really, this is one of the easier quirks of Swedish grammar.

See? It wasn’t that difficult after all.