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El sábado pasado celebramos mi cumpleaños en un restaurante.

El sábado pasado celebramos mi cumpleaños en un restaurante.
Last Saturday we celebrated my birthday in a restaurant.
From Lesson 131:Celebrations (¡feliz cumpleaños!, la Navidad)·Spanish (Spain)

Questions & Answers about El sábado pasado celebramos mi cumpleaños en un restaurante.

Why does the sentence use El sábado instead of a word for 'on' Saturday?
In Spanish, you do not use a preposition like 'on' with days of the week. Instead, you just use the masculine definite article (el for singular, los for plural). In this sentence, el sábado translates to 'on Saturday' or 'Saturday'.
How do we know celebramos means 'we celebrated' in the past, rather than 'we celebrate' right now?
For regular -ar verbs like celebrar, the nosotros (we) form is exactly the same in both the present tense and the simple past tense (preterite). You have to rely on context clues. Here, the phrase el sábado pasado (last Saturday) makes it clear that the action happened in the past.
Why does cumpleaños end in an 's' if the sentence is only talking about one birthday?
Cumpleaños is a compound word made from the verb cumple (completes/turns) and the plural noun años (years). Because it contains the plural word años, the combined word always ends in an 's'. It is used for both singular (mi cumpleaños) and plural (mis cumpleaños).
Why does the word pasado come after sábado?
In English, we say 'last Saturday', putting the adjective first. In Spanish, descriptive adjectives like pasado (past/last) generally come after the noun they describe to tell us which specific Saturday is being discussed.

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