Questions & Answers about Het meisje wast haar haar.
The lesson is about reflexive verbs. Why isn't there a zich (herself) in this sentence?
Because the girl is washing a specific thing (haar haar - her hair). You use zich when the action reflects entirely on the subject, like in Het meisje wast zich (The girl washes herself). When you specify a body part, Dutch usually works just like English and uses a possessive pronoun instead.
Why does the sentence say haar haar twice? Is that a typo?
Not a typo! The word haar has two completely different meanings in Dutch. The first haar is the possessive pronoun meaning "her", and the second haar is the noun meaning "hair". So haar haar perfectly translates to "her hair".
Meisje is a neuter het word. Why do we use haar (her) instead of a neuter pronoun?
Great memory! Because meisje is a diminutive (ending in -je), it is grammatically a neuter word. Strictly speaking, the neuter possessive pronoun is zijn (its). However, when talking about people, Dutch speakers almost always let the biological gender win, so we naturally say haar (her) for a girl.
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