Breakdown of Wir haben meinen Opa besucht.
haben
to have
wir
we
besuchen
to visit
meinen
my (accusative masculine)
der Opa
the grandpa
Questions & Answers about Wir haben meinen Opa besucht.
Why is the past participle besucht and not gebesucht?
The verb is besuchen (to visit). It starts with the inseparable prefix be-. Verbs that start with inseparable prefixes (like be-, ent-, er-, or ver-) do not get a ge- at the beginning when forming the past participle. You just take the stem (besuch) and add -t.
Why is it meinen Opa and not mein Opa?
Opa (grandpa) is a masculine noun. Because he is the direct object in this sentence (the person receiving the action of being visited), we must use the accusative case. For masculine nouns in the accusative, the word for "my" changes from mein to meinen.
Why is besucht at the very end of the sentence?
This is the standard word order for the conversational past tense (the Perfekt). The helping verb (haben) takes the normal second position in the sentence, and the past participle (besucht) gets pushed all the way to the very end.
The English translation says "We visited." Could this sentence also mean "We have visited"?
Yes! In everyday spoken German, this past tense structure is used for almost everything that happened in the past. It translates naturally to both "We visited" (simple past) and "We have visited" (present perfect) in English.
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