Breakdown of Mein Vater hat mir das Auto gezeigt.
haben
to have
das Auto
the car
mein
my
der Vater
the father
zeigen
to show
mir
me / to me (dative)
Questions & Answers about Mein Vater hat mir das Auto gezeigt.
Why is gezeigt at the very end of the sentence?
In German, the spoken past tense (the Perfekt) is made of two parts: a helper verb like hat and a past participle like gezeigt. The helper verb goes in the normal second position, but the past participle is always pushed to the very end of the sentence.
How do we get gezeigt from the verb zeigen?
zeigen (to show) is a regular verb. To make its past participle, you take off the -en ending to get the stem (zeig), then add ge- to the beginning and -t to the end. That gives us ge- + zeig + -t = gezeigt.
The literal translation is "My father has me the car showed". Why does the English translation just say "showed"?
While the German Perfekt tense is built like the English "has shown", Germans use it for almost all spoken past tense situations. So, hat ... gezeigt is the most natural way to say "showed" in conversational German.
Why does the sentence use mir instead of mich for "me"?
The verb zeigen (to show) usually involves two objects: what is being shown (das Auto) and who it is being shown to. The person receiving the action (the indirect object) needs the dative case. mir is the dative form of "I", meaning "to me".
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