Introduction to Afrikaans: Lesson 4

Do you remember how you had hy het dit gepraat instead of hy het gepraat dit because you ha d an end-travel situation. Well, here is what’s important:

Whenever you have two verbs in the sentence, you always have the end-travel situation.

Afrikaans for must is moet.

There is not that much of a difference that you would need to remember this separately. If you want to say I must do it you now have two verbs in the sentence: must and do so you must have the end-travel situation and the sentence becomes I must it do. How would you say it:

?I must do it.|Ek moet dit doen.

?We must speak Afrikaans.|Ons moet afrikaans praat.

You probably remember from cat - kat that c becomes k in Afrikaans. With this in mind, I am going to let you guess the word for can:

?can|kan

Say literally can you English speak:

?Can you speak English?|Kan jy engels praat?

Alright. The word for will probably comes from the word from shall:

Afrikaans for will (or shall) is sal.

The word shall used to stand in place of the word will - I shall do it tomorrow would mean I will do it tomorrow - and it probably still does in Afrikaans.

You can now say:

?I will work there.|Ek sal daar werk.

Here is another word from Dutch:

Afrikaans for go is gaan.

The Afrikaans word for tomorrow is just a very short English tomorrow: môre.

?She will not go tomorrow.|Sy sal môre nie gaan.

?They won’t work.|Hulle sal nie werk.

?We will not speak Afrikaans because we can’t do it: we have to speak English.|Ons sal afrikaans nie praat want ons kan dit nie doen: ons moet engels praat.

Afrikaans for money is geld.

Try the next sentence which is we will money needed have:

?We will want money.|Ons sal geld nodig het.

Or you could say simple things such as:

?I want to have it.|Ek wil dit het.

?Do you want to have it?|Wil jy dit het?

Alright... you know that most verbs and their infinitives (their to forms) are the same. There are a few exceptions. The first exception is with to be:

Afrikaans for to be is wees.

This knowledge enables you to say you will tomorrow there be:

?You will be there tomorrow.|Jy sal môre daar wees.

The second exception is to want:

Afrikaans for to want is hê.

?I will want it.|Ek sal dit hê.

And try this:

?Do you have to want that?|Moet jy dat hê?

You now know how to talk about the most important things and how to express the present, past and future. I want you to get back to something a bit now.

You remember that I mentioned that the word for me is my.

Afrikaans for see is sien.

Looks almost like seen. Say:

?He has seen me.|Hy het my gesien.

Which is of course the same as he saw me... Anyway, here is something that I want you to know:

Afrikaans for my is also my.

Afrikaans for friend is vriend.

?This is my friend.|Dit is my vriend.

Afrikaans for your is jou.

Afrikaans for country or land is land.

?Is this your country?|Is dit jou land?

And you also know the word for us or we which is ons. Well:

The word ons can also mean our!

And now you can say:

?This is our countries.|Dit is ons lande.

A bit technical: If you wonder why it is lande and not landde - well, that’s because the d is not a short vowel. We need not really got there because it doesn’t affect the pronunciation that much... we have kat + te and thus we have katte as the plural of kat but we also have lan + de because as the plural of land because if we had landde that is land + de you would need to make a pause between these two parts of the words and it would sound more like two words than one... which wouldn’t be cool. So anyway.

This is enough for this lesson.

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