Word
De katten zijn te bang.
Meaning
The cats are too scared.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Questions & Answers about De katten zijn te bang.
Why is it just bang and not bange?
In this sentence, the adjective bang (scared) comes after the verb zijn (are). When an adjective is used like this (separated from the noun by a verb), it is called a "predicative" adjective, and in Dutch, we never add an -e to the end of it.
What exactly does te mean here?
In this sentence, the word te means "too" (as in excessively). Placing it right before an adjective like bang gives us te bang (too scared).
Why does katten have two T's?
The singular word for cat is kat, which has a short "a" sound. To keep that short "a" sound when adding the plural ending -en, we must double the consonant. If we wrote katen, the "a" would change to a long vowel sound!
Why do we use De instead of Het here?
In Dutch, all plural nouns use the article de for "the", regardless of whether they are a de-word or a het-word in the singular.