Word
Stel dat we wat stoelen en kasten van de rommelmarkt meenemen?
Meaning
Suppose we take some chairs and cabinets from the flea market?
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Stel dat we wat stoelen en kasten van de rommelmarkt meenemen?
en
and
de stoel
the chair
de kast
the cabinet / the closet
meenemen
to take along / to bring
Questions & Answers about Stel dat we wat stoelen en kasten van de rommelmarkt meenemen?
I thought wat was used for uncountable nouns, but here it's used with plural countable nouns (stoelen en kasten). Is that correct?
Yes! While you probably learned early on that wat means "some" with uncountable nouns (like wat water), in everyday Dutch it is also very commonly used with plural countable nouns to mean "some" or "a few". Here, wat stoelen en kasten simply means "some chairs and cabinets". It feels a bit more casual and natural in speech than using words like enkele or een paar.
Why does the sentence start with stel dat? Doesn't stellen mean "to put" or "to place"?
Stellen has many different meanings depending on the context, but the fixed combination stel dat translates to "suppose that" or "imagine if". It is the standard, everyday way to introduce a hypothetical scenario in Dutch.
Why is the verb meenemen pushed all the way to the end of the sentence?
This happens because stel dat introduces a subordinate clause. The conjunction dat ("that") triggers subordinate word order, which forces all verbs to the very end of the clause. Since meenemen ("to take along") is a separable verb, its prefix (mee) and the main verb (nemen) are glued back together when pushed to the end.
What is the literal translation of rommelmarkt?