Ons raad bestuur die openbare park.

It breaks down like this:

• Ons raad — the subject noun phrase
• bestuur — the verb
• die openbare park — the direct object

So the overall structure is subject + verb + object.

Also, in ons raad, ons is a possessive determiner, so it already fills the slot where an article would go. That is why you get ons raad, not die ons raad.

Here, ons means our.

Afrikaans ons can mean:

• we
• us
• our

The function depends on where it appears in the sentence. Because it comes directly before the noun raad, it is possessive here: our council.

Compare:

• Ons raad bestuur die openbare park. — Our council manages the public park.
• Ons bestuur die openbare park. — We manage the public park.

In this sentence, raad means council.

Afrikaans raad can also mean advice in other contexts, so learners sometimes notice that it has more than one meaning. Here, though, the context makes council the natural reading, because a council can manage a public park.

So ons raad is best understood as our council.

Because Afrikaans verbs usually do not change form for person or number in the present tense.

So you get:

• Ek bestuur
• Jy bestuur
• Ons bestuur
• Die raad bestuur

The verb stays bestuur in all of these.

This is much simpler than English, where you have I manage but he manages.

Here, bestuur means manage, administer, or run.

It is a useful Afrikaans word because it can have more than one meaning depending on context. For example, it can also mean drive in sentences about vehicles.

In this sentence, because the subject is our council and the object is the public park, the meaning is clearly manage/administer, not drive.

Because Afrikaans adjectives often take an -e ending when they come before a noun.

So:

• Die park is openbaar. — here the adjective stands after the verb, so it is openbaar
• die openbare park — here the adjective comes before the noun, so it becomes openbare

This is the difference between the predicative form and the attributive form of the adjective.

Here, die is the definite article, meaning the.

One nice feature of Afrikaans is that die does not change for:

• singular vs. plural
• masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter

So you can have:

• die park — the park
• die parke — the parks

Afrikaans has a much simpler article system than languages like German or Dutch.

Yes. This is a normal main-clause pattern in Afrikaans.

Because the sentence starts with the subject, the order looks very familiar to an English speaker:

• subject + verb + object

So:

• Ons raad — subject
• bestuur — verb
• die openbare park — object

A useful extra point is that Afrikaans is often described as a verb-second language in main clauses. In this sentence, the subject is first, so the verb naturally comes second.

For a yes/no question, Afrikaans usually puts the finite verb first:

• Bestuur ons raad die openbare park?

So the verb bestuur moves in front of the subject.

This is similar to English Does our council manage the public park?, except Afrikaans does not need a separate helping verb like does.

Afrikaans normally uses double nie for negation.

So this sentence becomes:

• Ons raad bestuur nie die openbare park nie.

A simple way to think of it is:

• the first nie introduces the negation
• the second nie closes it off near the end of the clause

This double-negation pattern is one of the most distinctive features of standard Afrikaans grammar.