Word
De bel rinkelt wanneer het feest begint.
Meaning
The bell rings when the party begins.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Lesson
Breakdown of De bel rinkelt wanneer het feest begint.
wanneer
when
het feest
the party
beginnen
to begin
de bel
the bell
Questions & Answers about De bel rinkelt wanneer het feest begint.
Why is de bel used instead of het bel?
Dutch has two definite articles: de for common-gender nouns and het for neuter nouns. bel is a common-gender noun, so it takes de. There’s no simple rule for every noun, so you often have to learn the article together with the word or check a dictionary.
How do we get rinkelt from rinkelen?
rinkelen is a regular verb whose stem is rinkel-. For the third person singular present tense you add -t, giving rinkelt (“he/she/it rings”). So de bel rinkelt literally means “the bell rings.”
Why isn’t there a subject pronoun like hij before rinkelt?
In Dutch, when you already have a noun subject (de bel), you don’t repeat it with a pronoun. You would only use hij if you didn’t mention de bel before or if you want to emphasize it.
Why is begint at the end of wanneer het feest begint?
wanneer is a subordinating conjunction (“when”). In subordinate clauses the finite verb moves to the end. That’s why you say het feest begint rather than begint het feest.