Questions & Answers about De jongen eet een appel.
Notice how the verb eet comes right after De jongen. Is this word order exactly like English?
Yes, this sentence uses standard Subject-Verb-Object order. In regular Dutch sentences, the verb (eet) must sit in the second position, right after the subject (De jongen). This is known as the V2 rule, and it works very similarly to English for simple sentences.
If the dictionary form of 'to eat' is eten, why do we use eet here?
To get the 'he/she/it' form of a verb, Dutch usually takes the stem of the verb and adds a 't'. The stem of eten is eet. Because it already ends in a 't', we do not add another one! So 'the boy eats' is simply De jongen eet.
Is the word een pronounced with a long 'e' sound?
No! Even though it has a double 'e', een (meaning 'a' or 'an') is pronounced with a short, relaxed 'uh' sound, similar to the English word 'un'. Only the number one (één) is pronounced with a long 'ay' sound.
Why do we use De for 'the boy' instead of Het?
Dutch has two words for 'the': de and het. Every noun in Dutch belongs to one of these two groups, and jongen happens to be a de word. It is always a good idea to memorize whether a new word uses de or het when you first learn it.