Word
Gestern haben wir auf dem Balkon gespielt.
Meaning
Yesterday we played on the balcony.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Gestern haben wir auf dem Balkon gespielt.
spielen
to play
haben
to have
wir
we
der Balkon
the balcony
Questions & Answers about Gestern haben wir auf dem Balkon gespielt.
Why is the verb split into haben and gespielt, with gespielt at the very end?
This is the conversational past tense, called the Perfekt. It uses a helper verb (here, haben) in the second position of the sentence, and sends the past action word, or past participle (gespielt), all the way to the end.
How exactly is the past participle gespielt formed?
It comes from the regular verb spielen (to play). To make the past participle for regular (or 'weak') verbs, you take the stem (spiel), add ge- to the beginning, and add -t to the end. This gives you ge-spiel-t.
Why does the sentence say haben wir instead of wir haben?
In German, the main conjugated verb (here, haben) must almost always be in the second position. Because the sentence starts with the time word Gestern (Yesterday) in position one, the subject (wir) has to swap places with the verb and move to position three.
Why is it auf dem Balkon and not auf den Balkon?
The word auf (on) is a two-way preposition. When you are describing a fixed location where an action is happening, it uses the dative case. Since Balkon is a masculine word (der Balkon), the word der changes to dem in the dative case.