Learn about grammatical cases in Afrikaans
Now Playing: Lesson Audio
Get a breakdown of the dialogue and translations instantly with the Premium line-by-line Audio. Sign up for your Free Lifetime Account Now and get 7 Days of Premium Access including this feature.
Get this lesson’s key vocab, their translations and pronunciations. Sign up for your Free Lifetime Account Now and get 7 Days of Premium Access including this feature.
Unlock Lesson Notes and Transcripts for every single lesson. Sign Up for a Free Lifetime Account and Get 7 Days of Premium Access.
Intro |
|---|
| Antoni: How many tenses are there in Afrikaans? |
| Dewan: And how do they work? |
| Antoni: At AfrikaansPod101.com, we hear these questions often. Imagine this scenario: Sasha Lee is confused about Afrikaans tenses, so she asks her teacher, Driekie Kotze, |
| "How many tenses are there in Afrikaans?" |
| Sasha Lee: Hoeveel tye is daar in Afrikaans? |
| Dialogue |
| Sasha Lee: Hoeveel tye is daar in Afrikaans? |
| Driekie Kotze: Afrikaans het nog altyd net drie tye gehad. |
| Antoni: Once more with the English translation. |
| Sasha Lee: Hoeveel tye is daar in Afrikaans? |
| Antoni: "How many tenses are there in Afrikaans?" |
| Driekie Kotze: Afrikaans het nog altyd net drie tye gehad. |
| Antoni: "Afrikaans has always had only three tenses." |
Lesson focus |
| Antoni: The question we are answering in this lesson is: How many tenses are there in Afrikaans? We’ll also be talking about how they work. The good news, if you are a student of Afrikaans, is that there are only three tenses in Afrikaans—the past tense |
| Dewan: die verlede tyd, |
| Antoni: the present tense, |
| Dewan: die huidige tyd |
| Antoni: and, you’ve guessed it, the future tense, or |
| Dewan: die toekomende tyd. |
| Antoni: If you’re asking yourself how that’s possible, we don’t blame you. We’re sure it seems that having only three tenses must be quite limiting, but the fact is that it’s not. To create tenses like the imperfect and the perfect, for instance, Afrikaans uses contextual clues and time-related words. If you are curious about how to form the perfect and imperfect tenses in Afrikaans, you can find out more about that in one of our other lessons. |
| And while on the subject of the perfect tense, we’re going to take the opportunity to start talking about how the past tense is formed in Afrikaans. We mentioned the perfect tense because the past tense, in Afrikaans, is basically the same as the present perfect in English. The present perfect, as you probably know, describes an action or state that has already been mentioned before in a conversation, or that started in the past and has continued until now. A sentence like, “I have eaten,” is in the present perfect tense. You can hear that this sentence contains the auxiliary verb “have”, as well as the past participle of the verb. It is the same in Afrikaans when you want to form the past tense. The auxiliary verb “have” is |
| Dewan: het |
| Antoni: in Afrikaans, and, to form the past participle of most verbs, you simply add the prefix |
| Dewan: ge |
| Antoni: to the verb. Here’s an example, meaning, “I ate my food.” |
| Dewan: Ek het my kos geëet. |
| Antoni: As you can hear, even though the tense is the past simple, we still have to use the Afrikaans for “have” and the past participle. This applies to other variations of the past tense as well. The sentence |
| Dewan: Ek het my kos geëet. |
| Antoni: can mean, “I ate my food,” as we’ve already mentioned, but it can also mean, “I have eaten my food,” and “I had eaten my food.” As you can see, it’s really very simple to make just about any past tense construction in Afrikaans. That said, we do want to draw your attention to some variations on this pattern. You may already know that some verbs in Afrikaans already come with a prefix and, if that is the case, then, in the past tense, we put the |
| Dewan: ge |
| Antoni: between the prefix and the verb. The verb |
| Dewan: reghelp, |
| Antoni: meaning "to rectify" for instance, would then become |
| Dewan: reggehelp |
| Antoni: in the past tense. What you may not know yet is that there are some verbs which don’t take |
| Dewan: ge |
| Antoni: at all in the past tense. These are verbs that begin with prefixes like |
| Dewan: ver |
| Antoni: and |
| Dewan: ont |
| Antoni: For example, one would say, |
| Dewan: Ek het die kar verkoop |
| Antoni: meaning "I sold the car," not |
| Dewan: Ek het die kar geverkoop |
| Antoni: or |
| Dewan: vergekoop. |
| Antoni: Most Afrikaans speakers would still understand you if you did this, but you would probably get some odd looks! |
| Let’s move on now to discussing the present tense. As we mentioned before, Afrikaans only has the past, present, and future tenses. This means that, like the past tense, in Afrikaans, the present tense only really has one form. Interestingly, in Afrikaans, there is a preference for using the present tense in storytelling. When one does this in storytelling, it is called the historical present. |
| But, back to the main topic. We were saying that there is no present continuous tense or any of the other forms of the present tense that one might find in say, English, for instance. If one translates the sentence, |
| Dewan: Ek lees, |
| Antoni: then it could mean “I read” or “I am reading”. As with the past tense in Afrikaans, context is everything. That and a few well-placed time-related words. For instance, if we wanted to convey the present continuous in the sentence we just used, then we could add a word like “now” or |
| Dewan: nou. |
| Antoni: The new sentence would then be |
| Dewan: Ek lees nou, |
| Antoni: meaning, “I am reading now”. You could also add a word like “busy” or |
| Dewan: besig. |
| Antoni: That way, you can say, “I am busy reading,” or |
| Dewan: Ek is besig om te lees. |
| Antoni: which translates directly to “I am busy to read.” Of course, one only adds these kinds of clues when it’s necessary. As we said, most of the time the context will make it clear what tense you are using. One important thing you should take note of is that with verbs that have separable prefixes like |
| Dewan: aan-, [pause] op- [pause], toe-, [pause] |
| Antoni: and |
| Dewan: uit-, |
| Antoni: these prefixes come at the end of the sentence in the present tense. Here’s an example using the verb for “close,” which is |
| Dewan: toemaak. |
| Antoni: The sentence is: |
| Dewan: Ek maak die venster toe, |
| Antoni: which translates directly to “I make the window closed.” As you can hear, the separable prefix |
| Dewan: toe |
| Antoni: was placed at the end of the sentence. Also note that the sentence could mean, “I close the window” or “I am closing the window.” As an example of how context gives insight into the tense being used, imagine someone had asked, “What are you doing?” or |
| Dewan: Wat doen jy? |
| Antoni: and this had been the reply: |
| Dewan: Ek maak die venster toe, |
| Antoni: Within this context, the reply would have been in the present continuous. This principle, and the others I have mentioned in this lesson, apply to the future tense as well—the more subtle variations of the tense are understood through contextual or lexical clues. |
| In English, we often use the word “will” in the future tense. The Afrikaans equivalent of this word is |
| Dewan: sal |
| Antoni: so, if I want to say, “I will go to the store,” in Afrikaans, it will sound like this: |
| Dewan: Ek sal winkel toe gaan. |
| Antoni: You might have noticed that the main verb was placed at the end of the sentence in this case. The verb is |
| Dewan: gaan, |
| Antoni: which means “to go.” This is the rule when using the future tense and the word |
| Dewan: sal. |
| Antoni: The infinitive of the main verb always goes at the end of the sentence. There is also another word you can use when speaking or writing in the future tense and that is |
| Dewan: gaan. |
| Antoni: You will remember that it is a verb meaning “to go,” but it also functions in the same way as the English “going to” when used in the future tense. Listen to this example, meaning “I am going to go tomorrow.” |
| Dewan: Ek gaan môre gaan. |
| Antoni: As you can hear, there is no need to add an “I-N-G” to the verb. Just an aside—in vernacular speech, it has become common to drop the second |
| Dewan: gaan |
| Antoni: in sentences like these. To continue—in Afrikaans, you do not need to conjugate the verbs in the past or present tenses either, except when adding the prefix |
| Dewan: ge |
| Antoni: in the past tense. This makes learning Afrikaans a lot easier than many other languages when it comes to verb conjugation and tense formation. And now, believe it or not, you have learned about all the tenses in Afrikaans. |
| [Summary] |
| Antoni: In this lesson, you learned about the three tenses in Afrikaans. These are the past, present, and future tenses. You learned that Afrikaans tenses are very simple and that, for the most part, one doesn’t have to conjugate verbs, except in the past tense where one adds the prefix |
| Dewan: ge |
| Antoni: to the verb. You learned that, to form the past tense in Afrikaans, you can use the present perfect tense in English as a sort of template, because, in Afrikaans, one uses |
| Dewan: het |
| Antoni: or “have” and the past participle of the verb. You learned that the present tense always, simply, uses the infinitive of the verb, and that it is often the preferred tense in storytelling. Finally, you learned that, in the future tense, Afrikaans uses the auxiliary verbs |
| Dewan: sal |
| Antoni: or |
| Dewan: gaan |
| Antoni: to indicate that it is the future. |
| Expansion/Contrast (Optional) |
| Antoni: As we pointed out earlier, there is no need to worry about learning verb conjugations in Afrikaans—except for the past tense—but there are two exceptions to this rule. Let’s start with the verb |
| Dewan: hê |
| Antoni: which is the infinitive form of the auxiliary verb we already know as |
| Dewan: het. |
| Antoni: This is the form it takes in the past and the present. It means “to have.” In the future tense, we use the infinitive. For instance, if you are expecting a package you could say, “I will have it tomorrow,” or |
| Dewan: Ek sal dit môre hê. |
| Antoni: for most Afrikaans speakers, it would sound strange if you said, |
| Dewan: Ek sal dit môre het. |
| Antoni: This form is still used by a portion of the Afrikaans population in the oldest dialect called Western Cape Afrikaans, but it's not very common. In English, that would be like saying, “I will had it tomorrow.” |
| The other verb that needs a little conjugation in different tenses in Afrikaans is the verb “to be” or |
| Dewan: wees. |
| Antoni: In the present tense, it takes the form |
| Dewan: is, |
| Antoni: as in |
| Dewan: Ek is hier, |
| Antoni: or “I am here.” And, in the past tense, it takes the form |
| Dewan: was, |
| Antoni: as in |
| Dewan: Ek was hier, |
| Antoni: or “I was here.” In the future tense, one would say, |
| Dewan: Ek sal daar wees, |
| Antoni: or “I will be there.” The future tense is the one that uses the infinitive form of this verb. Fortunately, there are only these two exceptions. Modal verbs also have different forms, but they are not very difficult to learn. We touched briefly on this subject in our lesson on the imperfect and perfect tenses in Afrikaans. |
| Cultural Insight/Expansion (Optional) |
| Antoni: As a final note, we’d like to quickly talk about love. Well, to be clear, we’d like to talk about the verb, “to love” in Afrikaans. It is a little unusual and thus requires a special slot. |
| The infinitive form of the verb is |
| Dewan: liefhê, |
| Antoni: and you will probably recognize the separable suffix |
| Dewan: hê |
| Antoni: in that word. In the present tense, this conjugates to |
| Dewan: het lief, |
| Antoni: or “have love.” That said, to say it this way would be a little unusual because it is much more common, in the present tense, to replace |
| Dewan: het |
| Antoni: with |
| Dewan: is |
| Antoni: as in |
| Dewan: is lief. |
| Antoni: This means that, if you want to say “I love you,” to someone in Afrikaans, you can say it in one of two ways. You can either say, |
| Dewan: Ek het jou lief, |
| Antoni: or you can say |
| Dewan: Ek is lief vir jou. |
| Antoni: The second form is the more common one. |
| In the past tense, one also uses two verbs. Have a listen: |
| Dewan: Ek was lief vir jou gewees. |
| Antoni: This simply translates to: "I loved you" or "I used to love you." Again, in the vernacular, the last be-verb conjugation is often dropped. Another way to say this in the past tense is |
| Dewan: Ek het jou lief gehad. |
| Antoni: As you heard, the auxiliary verb was the Afrikaans for “to have” and, in the past tense, it is |
| Dewan: gehad. |
| Antoni: When it comes to the future tense, in Afrikaans, one uses the infinitive form for “love.” Listen to this example of a child trying to bribe her mother: |
| Dewan: Ek sal jou liefhê as jy vir my ‘n roomys koop. |
| Antoni: This means, “I will love you if you buy me an ice cream.” Sadly, her mother did not fall for it. |
| And that brings us to the end of this lesson. Now you know about all the tenses in Afrikaans. Well done! |
Outro |
| Antoni: Do you have any more questions? We’re here to answer them! |
| Dewan: Totsiens! |
| Antoni: See you soon! |
| Credits: Dewan (Afrikaans, Pietermaritzburg), Antoni (English, synthetic voice) |
Comments
Hide