Breakdown of Wat een mooie speelplaats, hij is best groot!
zijn
to be
hij
he / it (referring to a 'de'-word)
groot
big
mooi
beautiful
Questions & Answers about Wat een mooie speelplaats, hij is best groot!
Wait, doesn't best mean 'the best'? Why does it translate to 'quite' here?
In Dutch, when best is placed before an adjective like groot, it acts as an adverb of moderate degree meaning 'quite', 'pretty', or 'fairly'. It softens the adjective slightly. If you actually wanted to say 'the best playground', you would use it as an adjective and say de beste speelplaats.
Why does the sentence use hij (he) to refer to a playground?
Because speelplaats is a de-word. In Dutch, you refer back to de-words using hij (he) or die (that), and you only use het (it) to refer back to het-words. English speakers naturally want to call all inanimate objects 'it', but in Dutch, grammatical gender dictates the pronoun!
Is Wat een the standard way to make an exclamation like 'What a...'?
Yes, Wat een is exactly how you express 'What a...' in Dutch exclamations. It works identically to English, followed directly by the noun or adjective-noun combination, as in Wat een mooie speelplaats.
Why does mooi get an extra -e to become mooie here?
Because speelplaats is a de-word. When an adjective comes directly before a de-word noun, it gets an -e ending regardless of the article. The only time you drop the -e is when you have a het-word preceded by een or no article at all.