Word
Wann hast du deinen Laptop verkauft?
Meaning
When did you sell your laptop?
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Wann hast du deinen Laptop verkauft?
du
you (informal singular)
haben
to have
der Laptop
the laptop
deinen
your (informal singular, accusative masculine)
Questions & Answers about Wann hast du deinen Laptop verkauft?
Why doesn't the past participle verkauft start with ge-?
The verb is verkaufen (to sell), which starts with the prefix ver-. This is an inseparable prefix. Verbs that start with inseparable prefixes (like ver-, be-, or er-) do not get an extra ge- added to them when forming the past participle.
Why does the sentence use deinen instead of just dein?
Laptop is a masculine noun (der Laptop). In this sentence, it is the direct object (the thing being sold), which means it must be in the accusative case. In the accusative case, masculine words take an -en ending, so dein becomes deinen.
Why is verkauft at the very end of the question?
This is the standard word order for the German past tense (Perfekt). The helping verb (hast) takes the normal verb position after the question word (Wann), and the past participle (verkauft) is pushed to the very end of the sentence.
The English translation says 'did you sell', but the German literally means 'have you sold'. Why is that?
In spoken German, this past tense structure (a helping verb like haben plus a past participle) is the normal way to talk about things that happened in the past. It translates naturally to both 'have sold' and 'did sell' in English.