Questions & Answers about Wij kletsten vaak in het college.
How do we know to use -ten instead of -den for the past tense of kletsen?
This is where the 't kofschip rule comes in! First, find the stem by removing -en from the infinitive verb kletsen, which gives us klets. The last letter is s. Because s is one of the consonants in 't kofschip (a voiceless sound), the past tense gets a t. Since wij is plural, we add -ten to the stem: klets + ten = kletsten.
Wait, doesn't college mean the school itself, like a university?
It is a false friend! In Dutch, college usually means a lecture or a specific class at a university, not the institution itself. If you want to talk about the school you attend, you would say de universiteit (university) or de hogeschool (college of higher education).
Could I put vaak at the beginning of the sentence: Vaak wij kletsten in het college?
Almost, but remember the verb-second rule. If you start with the adverb vaak, the verb must still come in the second position, and the subject moves to the third spot. So it would be: Vaak kletsten wij in het college. In our example sentence, wij is first, so the verb is second, and vaak comes third.