Toekomstige tijd

taken from Nederlands in Uitvoering

Yesterday, Mandy told me: "I have no idea how to write [in the past tense], or the future tense, so I mostly just stick with the present for now".

The past tense in Dutch needs some more explanation, but the future tense is failry easy:

"kunnen" vs "mogen"

Illustration taken from Nandita

Three days ago, Mandy asked: "about the difference between 'kun' and 'kan', and when you use those or when you use 'mag'".

Which is a great question!

"je gaat" vs "ga je"

Conjugating a verb in Dutch is not too difficult, but you will need to understand the following principals: find the stem of the verb, that will be the first person singular, add a 't' to it to get the second and third person singular and add 'en' to the stem to get all the plural forms.

Let's take an easy one: werken (put your mouse on top of the word to see the translation)

werken	voorbeeld
ik werk	ik werk als receptionist
jij/je werkt	jij werkt thuis
hij/zij/het werkt	Mark? Hij werkt vandaag niet.
wij werken	wij werken op het postkantoor
jullie werken	Dag collega's, jullie werken hard!
zij werken	Jan en Bart, zij werken op maandag