Questions & Answers about Vi havde reserveret lokalet i januar.
The lesson is about the stative passive. Is this sentence passive?
No, this sentence is active because it states exactly who did the action (vi). It uses the active past perfect tense (havde reserveret). To turn this into a stative passive describing the resulting state of the room, you would use være and say Lokalet var reserveret (The venue was reserved).
Why does lokale become lokalet here?
Et lokale (a room or venue) is a neuter noun that already ends in an -e. To make it definite and mean 'the venue', you just add a -t at the end instead of the usual full -et suffix.
Why is the month written with a lowercase letter in i januar?
Unlike in English, months, days of the week, and languages are never capitalized in Danish unless they happen to be the very first word of the sentence. The preposition i is used for months, which works exactly like 'in' in English.
Could we use var instead of havde to form the past perfect here?
No. While some Danish verbs of motion or change of state use at være to form their perfect tenses (like var taget or var gået), at reservere is a regular verb that takes a direct object. It always uses at have as its helper verb for active perfect tenses, so it must be havde reserveret.