Word
Das Kind hat vorgestern viel geweint.
Meaning
The child cried a lot the day before yesterday.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Das Kind hat vorgestern viel geweint.
das Kind
the child
haben
to have
viel
much / a lot
vorgestern
the day before yesterday
Questions & Answers about Das Kind hat vorgestern viel geweint.
The translation says "cried", but doesn't hat ... geweint literally mean "has cried"?
Yes, the literal translation is "The child has cried." However, in spoken German, this two-part tense (the Perfekt) is the standard way to express the simple past. You will use it to mean both "cried" and "has cried".
Why is geweint placed at the very end of the sentence?
This is the standard word order for the Perfekt tense. The helper verb (hat) takes the regular second position in the sentence, and the past participle (geweint) is pushed to the very end. This creates a "verb bracket" that wraps around the rest of the information in the sentence (vorgestern viel).
How is the past participle geweint built from the dictionary verb weinen (to cry)?
weinen is a regular (or "weak") verb. To form its past participle, you take off the -en ending to get the stem wein. Then, you add ge- to the beginning and -t to the end, giving you ge + wein + t.
Is vorgestern made up of two different words?
Exactly! gestern means "yesterday", and vor means "before". Put them together, and vorgestern literally means "before yesterday", which is the German word for "the day before yesterday".