tricky one: mice's/of these mice

Обсуждение вопросов, нюансов и тонкостей грамматики английского языка любого уровня.

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Dashkinru
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#1

Сообщение Dashkinru »

Hi! Friends, I'm an English teacher and I need to give my students the best explanation and example of possessive case with tricky words. Which of these variants is more natural for natives? Maybe I can't even say like this and there are mistakes...
1. The mice’s tails are thin.
2. The tails of these mice are thin.
3. I see mice. Their tails are thin. (Personally I'd prefer paraphrasing to the first two examples)

Also I got to know that it's ok to use "of the" with animate nouns if the sentence is long
4. " The phone of my close friend works always perfect". Is it true? Or this way it's grammatically correct but unnatural?
5. and this " I see the car of my boss." Ok grammatically? Or it sould be "I see my boss's car."
I always thought both ways are possible when you speak about animate nouns but now I'm not sure.
So, help me, please to figure it out)
tourist
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#2

Сообщение tourist »

Strictly speaking,four out of your five examples are OK grammatically.
A few suggestions,though:

- replace mice with rats ... to avoid questions about mice vs. mouses )
#1 and #2 ... very subtle difference,but both are natural
- The phone of my close friend works always perfect
should be: always works perfectly (perfect is too informal)
but this is still unnatural
rephrase: is always busy / is very old or some such.

- my close friend's phone ... sounds better (compared to your version)

- a/the phone of a friend of mine is also possible.
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Dashkinru
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