German Language Stack Exchange is a bilingual question and answer site for speakers of all levels who want to share and increase their knowledge of the German language. It's 100% free, no registration required.
Sign up to join this community
I see a youtube 'bout bad dad jokes. Im german thats why I do not get the point.
Well you can run throu in campground. Thats a fact. The point is about the tempora of the word run? You have to use the (simple)past-tense version of run - ran?
Why is past tent's used instead of past-tense? Have Past-Tense a speacial meaning I did not get? Is there a good translation of this bad-dad-joke into german?
First, this is the wrong stackexchange to ask the main question in (German, not English).
Secondly, the joke is based on the phrase "running past tents". "Past tents" means "an Zelten vorbei", but it sounds similar to "past tense", which is a word form of verbs. So, as the joke says, you can't "run" through a campground, but you have to "ran". It's a "meta"-joke on grammar, connected to the actual meaning of the sentences. There is no logic behind it.
Thirdly, this joke does not translate well to German. It's probably not possible to find another word that sounds like "Vergangenheit" or "Vergangenheitsform" or "Präteritum", in a way that "tents" is similar to "tense".
