Word
We hebben gisteren een boot gehuurd.
Meaning
We rented a boat yesterday.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of We hebben gisteren een boot gehuurd.
een
a/an
hebben
to have
gisteren
yesterday
de boot
the boat
Questions & Answers about We hebben gisteren een boot gehuurd.
Why does the Dutch sentence say 'We hebben... gehuurd' (We have rented) if the English translation is just 'We rented'?
In spoken Dutch, the Present Perfect tense (using hebben + a past participle) is the most natural and common way to talk about finished past actions. While it literally translates to 'We have rented', it is the standard way to express the English simple past 'We rented'.
Why is gehuurd pushed all the way to the end of the sentence?
When a Dutch sentence has a helping verb (like hebben) and a past participle (like gehuurd), they split up. The helping verb takes the second position in the sentence, and the past participle is sent to the very end. Everything else, like gisteren (yesterday) and een boot (a boat), gets sandwiched in between!
How do we know whether to end gehuurd with a -d or a -t?
To find out, we look at the stem of the full verb huren (to rent). If you remove the -en, the stem is huur, which ends in r. Because r is a 'voiced' consonant (it is not one of the letters in the memory word 't kofschip), the regular past participle takes a -d.
The full verb is huren with one u, but gehuurd has a double uu. Where did the extra u come from?