Barnet viser sin tegning til læreren.

Barn means child in an indefinite sense: a child.

Barnet means the child. In Danish, the definite article is usually added as an ending to the noun rather than written as a separate word.

• barn = a child
• barnet = the child

Because the sentence refers to the child, Danish uses -et here.

Danish nouns have grammatical gender, and the definite ending depends on the gender.

• et barn → barnet
• en lærer → læreren

So:

• -et is the usual definite ending for neuter nouns
• -en is the usual definite ending for common gender nouns

That is why you get:

• barnet = the child
• læreren = the teacher

Viser is the present tense of vise (to show).

For many Danish verbs, the present tense is formed by adding -r:

• vise = to show
• viser = shows / is showing

So Barnet viser ... means The child shows ...

Because sin/sit/sine must agree with the thing being possessed, not with the owner.

Here, the possessed thing is tegning (drawing), and tegning is:

• singular
• common gender

So the correct form is sin.

Compare:

• sin tegning = his/her/its own drawing
• sit hus = his/her/its own house
• sine bøger = his/her/its own books

A very common learner mistake is to choose the form based on barnet, but that is not how it works. The form depends on tegning.

Because sin is a reflexive possessive. It is used when the possessor is the subject of the clause.

In this sentence, the subject is Barnet (the child), and the drawing belongs to that same child. So Danish uses sin:

• Barnet viser sin tegning til læreren.
  = The child shows his/her own drawing to the teacher.

If you used hans or hendes, it would usually mean the drawing belongs to someone else:

• Barnet viser hans tegning til læreren.
  = The child shows his drawing to the teacher.
  (Usually: some other male person's drawing)

So sin is important because it shows that the drawing belongs to the child.

It can correspond to his, her, or its in English, as long as it refers back to the subject of the clause.

Danish sin/sit/sine does not by itself tell you whether the owner is male or female. It mainly tells you that the owner is the subject.

So in this sentence, sin tegning means:

• his own drawing
• her own drawing
• sometimes its own drawing

English usually has to choose a gendered possessive, but Danish does not need to here.

Here til means to.

The phrase vise noget til nogen means to show something to someone.

So:

• sin tegning = his/her own drawing
• til læreren = to the teacher

This is a very normal Danish pattern.

You may also hear another pattern without til:

• Barnet viser læreren sin tegning.

That also means The child shows the teacher his/her own drawing.

So Danish can express this idea in more than one way.

Yes. That is also correct Danish.

There are two common patterns:

• vise noget til nogen
• vise nogen noget

So both of these work:

• Barnet viser sin tegning til læreren.
• Barnet viser læreren sin tegning.

They mean essentially the same thing: The child shows the teacher his/her own drawing.

For a learner, the version with til can sometimes feel easier to understand because it matches English show something to someone more closely.

This is the normal word order for a simple main clause in Danish:

subject + verb + object + prepositional phrase

So here:

• Barnet = subject
• viser = verb
• sin tegning = direct object
• til læreren = prepositional phrase

That makes the structure very straightforward.

Danish word order can change in other sentence types, especially when another element comes first, but this sentence uses the basic pattern.

No, not in the way you might see in languages like German.

Modern Danish has very little case marking on nouns. Here, læreren is simply the definite form of lærer, and its role is shown mainly by the preposition til.

So til læreren is just to the teacher, not a separate dative noun form.

Tegning means drawing.

It comes from the verb tegne (to draw), and -ing is a common ending that can make a noun.

So:

• tegne = to draw
• en tegning = a drawing
• tegningen = the drawing

In the sentence, sin tegning means his/her own drawing.

Then you would use sine, because the possessed noun would be plural.

• Barnet viser sine tegninger til læreren.

Compare:

• sin tegning = his/her own drawing
• sine tegninger = his/her own drawings

This is a good way to remember the reflexive possessives:

• sin
  • common gender singular
• sit
  • neuter singular
• sine
  • plural

A careful approximation is:

BAR-neð VEE-ser seen TINE-ing til LARE-er-en

A few useful notes:

• d in barnet is often softened
• viser has a clear v sound
• sin is pronounced like seen
• tegning has a Danish vowel that does not match English exactly
• læreren often sounds more compressed in natural speech than the spelling suggests

If you are learning pronunciation, it is best to listen to native audio, because Danish pronunciation is often less obvious than the spelling suggests.