I am trying to learn Japanese with Genki and encountered an exercise in which I had to make suggestions. One of them was “Would you come to my house ?”. I translated it by “うちに来ませんか。” but the correction had “私の” to start the sentence. Isn’t うち precise enough ? I feel that if I had used いえ I would have needed to add the precision.
3 comments
家（うち）can mean either “(a) house” or “home” (or several other things that aren’t important right now, including a bunch of meanings of 内（うち） that overlap with 家（うち）).
In the sentence うちに来ませんか。, うち is most semantically compatible with the former meaning, so it is better to specify 私のうち. It’s basically a synonym of いえ.
I’m not 100% sure, but if you don’t specify 私の it could also maybe be understood as implying あなたの.
Context is important here. The sentence would work on situation where you are walking your date back home and she’s asking whether you would like to come inside for example.
Native speaker here.
To me, うちに来ませんか is a broad statement where うち can encapsulate various types of “inner circles” (e.g. my company, my team, my school, etc). When you say 私のうち, that’s when it’s narrowed down to “my house/home”.
Now, of course, by context うちに来ませんか works just fine as an invitation to “my house”, but in general 私のうち is much less ambiguous than just うち.