Talking about yesterday Gëschter
The perfect tense: what you did, where you went and what you ate, with hunn or sinn plus a participle.
By the end of this lesson you can
- Say what you did yesterday, last week or on holiday with the perfect tense.
- Choose hunn or sinn and put the participle at the end.
- Use the short past of common verbs such as war and hat.
19 words and phrases
- gëschter
- yesterday
- virgëschter
- the day before yesterday
- d'lescht Woch
- last week
- Ech hu gemaach.
- I did / made.
- Ech hu giess.
- I ate.
- Ech hu gedronk.
- I drank.
- Ech hu geschafft.
- I worked.
- Ech hu gesinn.
- I saw.
- Ech hu kaaft.
- I bought.
- Ech hu gelies.
- I read.
- Ech hu geschlof.
- I slept.
- Ech si gaangen.
- I went.
- Ech si komm.
- I came.
- Ech si bliwwen.
- I stayed.
- Ech si gefuer.
- I drove / travelled.
- Ech war
- I was
- Ech hat
- I had
- d'Vakanz
- the holidays
- Wat hues du gëschter gemaach?
- What did you do yesterday?
Grammar
The perfect tense
Most of the past is the perfect: hunn or sinn plus a participle, which goes to the end of the sentence. Ech hu gëschter e Buch gelies.
Verbs of movement or change take sinn: goen → gaangen, kommen → komm, fueren → gefuer, bleiwen → bliwwen (stay counts too). Everything else takes hunn.
Note the Eifel rule again: "hunn" becomes "hu" and "sinn" becomes "si" before g, k and most other consonants.
Only a few verbs have a simple past in speech: war (was), hat (had), and the modal verbs.
- Mir sinn an d'Stad gaangen. — We went into town.
- Si huet Gromperen kaaft. — She bought potatoes.
The short past: war, hat, koum, goung
In speech, the perfect is the usual way to talk about the past. A few common verbs also have a short past that people use instead: war and hat (sinn and hunn), koum (kommen), goung (goen), konnt and wollt (kënnen and wëllen).
Use the form for the person: ech war, du waars, hien war. The tables on the verbs page list every form.
- Gëschter war ech midd. — Yesterday I was tired.
- Ech hat keng Zäit. — I had no time.
- Si koum gëschter heem. — She came home yesterday.
- Hie goung gëschter schaffen. — He went to work yesterday.
Practice
14 exercises: multiple choice, typing, matching pairs and word order.