Breakdown of Gisteren hebben we mooie kaki T-shirts besteld.
hebben
to have
bestellen
to order
mooi
beautiful
gisteren
yesterday
Questions & Answers about Gisteren hebben we mooie kaki T-shirts besteld.
Why does mooie get an -e ending, but kaki does not?
Regular adjectives like mooi get an -e when they come before a plural noun like T-shirts. However, kaki is an invariable adjective. Because it is a loanword ending in a vowel, it never takes the -e ending. This is also true for other similar words, like roze or gratis.
Why is the verb hebben placed before the subject we?
Why does the Dutch sentence use hebben ... besteld (have ordered) when the English translation uses the simple past (ordered)?
In everyday spoken and written Dutch, the present perfect tense is the standard choice for describing completed past events. While you could technically use the simple past bestelden, it would sound unusually formal or literary in this everyday context.
How does the pluralization of the English loanword T-shirts work in Dutch?