Breakdown of Das Baby weinte, darum tröstete der große Bruder es.
es
it
groß
big / tall
der Bruder
the brother
das Baby
the baby
weinen
to cry
darum
therefore / for that reason
der
who, which, that (relative pronoun; die, das)
trösten
to comfort
Questions & Answers about Das Baby weinte, darum tröstete der große Bruder es.
How do we know weinte is in the past tense here?
weinte is the simple past (Präteritum) of the regular verb weinen (to cry). To form the simple past of regular (weak) verbs, you take the verb stem (wein-) and add -te for the 3rd person singular (er/sie/es) form.
Why does tröstete have an extra 'e' in the middle compared to weinte?
The verb trösten (to comfort) has a stem that ends in a 't' (tröst-). If we just added the past tense ending -te, it would be tröstte, which is hard to pronounce. To fix this, German inserts an extra e between the stem and the ending, making it tröstete.
Why does the verb tröstete come right after darum? Shouldn't the subject come first?
Why is the pronoun at the end es?
The pronoun es refers back to das Baby. Even though a baby is a person, the grammatical gender of the word Baby is neuter in German. Therefore, you must use the neuter accusative pronoun es to mean 'it' or 'him/her' in this context.
Why is it der große Bruder and not der großer Bruder?
Because the noun has a definite article (der), the adjective takes a 'weak' ending. For a masculine noun in the nominative case (the subject of the sentence), that weak ending is just -e.
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