Hi and welcome to this series of lessons
on the parts of speech My name is Ganesh and in this first
lesson I'm going to give you a quick Introduction to the eight parts of
speech. In the following lessons we'll learn more in detail about each part of
speech. Before we start just remember if you have any questions at all you just
have to let me know in the comments section below and I will talk to you
there. OK so first of all what is a part of
speech? Well a part of speech is just the name
given to a word based on the job that it does in a sentence. Think of parts of
speech as being kind of like job titles Just like a person can be a teacher or a
doctor or a lawyer - a word can be a verb, an adjective, a noun etc depending
on the job that it does in a sentence And these can be really useful to learn
because when you're studying grammar you will come across terms like these, you
will come across terms like nouns, verbs and adjectives, and if you know what they
mean it can help you to speed up your study of grammar. Alright so how many parts of speech are
there? There are eight parts of speech and we start by talking about the verb.
We start with the verb because verbs are probably the most important words in the
English language, and that is for two reasons: first every sentence in English
must have a verb - you cannot have sentences without verbs in English, and
the second reason is that only verbs have tenses. I'm sure you know about past
tense, present tense and future tense That's how we talk about different times
and to do that we change the forms of verbs. So verbs are really important.
So what does a verb do? Well a verb is a word that shows an
action or a state - state means a situation. For example in the sentence
"Dylan plays tennis three times a week." In the sentence the verb is play because
that's the action, and we're saying plays because for he,she and it we say plays -
we add the 's' to the verb in the present tense, so "Dylan plays." In this next
sentence "I am a teacher" - can you tell me which is the verb? The verb is 'am; - that's
basically just the verb to be - but we say I am, you are, he is etc. so "I am a teacher"
Now I want you to notice a very important difference between these two
sentences. Notice that in the first sentence we are talking about a physical
action because playing is something that we do physically. But in the second
sentence we are not talking about any physical action - we're just saying "I am a
teacher." We call that a state, that means a
situation. So verbs can show actions or they can show states or situations. Those are the two types of verbs OKthe next part of speech is the noun.
A noun is the name given to a person, place, animal, thing, feeling or idea. For
example here's a sentence with a lot of nouns - "Rosie went to Malta on vacation
with her family last year." Can you identify all the nouns in the
sentence? Well the first noun is Rosie - it's the
name of a person. The second noun is Malta Malta is the name of a place. It's
actually a beautiful small little island country in Europe. Malta is a place.
The next noun is vacation. Vacation is the name given to a type of trip the people
take, and the noun after that is family What's a family? Afamily is a group of
people who are related - mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters etc. and
the last noun in the sentence is year - a year is just 365 days or the time that
it takes the earth to go around the Sun. Now of course nouns can also be animals
like dogs or cats or a noun could be a thing like watch, pen, t-shirt etc. Or it
could be a feeling such as love or anger Those are all nouns. What's a pronoun then? A pronoun is a
word that replaces a noun - replaces means it takes the place of a noun. But you
might ask - why should a pronoun do that? Well take a look at this sentence -
"Melvin is at the movies with Melvin's girlfriend." "Melvin really enjoys spending time with
Melvin's girlfriend" Now of course that sounds really stupid and that is because -
can you tell me why? Can you tell me what the problem is in that sentence? Well the problem is that we keep
repeating Melvin and Melvin's girlfriend and that is very unnatural - we don't talk
like that. And to avoid that kind of repetition we can use pronouns. So can
you tell me where you would use pronouns in those two sentences? We can say
"Melvin is at the movies with his girlfriend. He really enjoys spending
time with her." There are three pronouns there - his, He and her. Did you get all of those? OK now i want you to notice that the
pronoun 'he' is in the subject position. He is the subject of the verb enjoy - who
enjoys? He enjoys, and the pronoun 'her' is in the object position. Now to replace a
noun in the subject position like Melvin for example, we use what are called subject
pronouns - these are I, you, we, they, he, she, and it. And to replace a noun in the
object position - can you guess what we use? We use object pronouns - Those are me,
you, us, them, him, her, and it. Now there are other pronouns in English such as his,
hers, this, that etc. but we will talk about them in more detail when we come to the
lesson on pronouns. For now just remember that the pronoun replaces a noun to
avoid repetition and to make our speech sound more natural. OK the next part of speech is the
adjective. An adjective is a word that gives us information about a noun or a
pronoun. Have a look at this sentence "They drive an amazing big red sports
car." Here the noun that we are interested in is car. So can you identify all the
adjectives that give information about car? Well if you said amazing, big, red and
sports, you are correct because all of those are adjectives and if you look at
them closely you will realize that these give us answers to questions like What
color? What size? What type? etc. The adjective 'amazing' gives us the answer to
the question "What is your opinion of the car? If you ask me "What's your opinion of the
car?" I will tell you it's amazing. What size is the car? Tt's big What's the color? It's red. And what type
of car is it? It's a sports car. OK now that's all
great but I don't know if you noticed There's actually one more adjective in
this sentence and that is the word 'an' Now the words a, an, and the are called articles in
English. And articles are also adjectives because they give us information about
the nouns that come after them. In this sentence, for example, we know that they
drive one car - we know that because we said an amazing big red sports car. So remember that adjectives give us
information about nouns and pronouns, and they answer questions like What type? What
color? What size etc. OKbut what are adverbs? Now when I learned grammar in
school I was taught that adjectives give information about nouns and adverbs give
information about verbs, and in fact a lot of teachers still teach it that way.
But the thing is that's only half correct because an adverb can give
information about a verb but it can also give information about an adjective or
even another adverb. So these are really talented words you see - they can do a lot
of things. And adverbs usually answer questions like When? Why? How? In what way? etc. Llet me show you a sentence so you
can see all the different things that adverbs can do - "Yesterday evening, we
walked somewhat slowly in a very beautiful garden." In this sentence the
first adverb is 'yesterday evening' - that shows us when the action happened. The action here is 'walk' - that's the verb.
There's another adverb 'slowly' and that shows us how the action
happened - How did we walk? We walked slowly. So both 'Yesterday evening' and
'slowly' tell us about the verb 'walk'. But notice that you can further ask - how
slowly did we walk? Did we walk very slowly or a little slowly? The answer is
somewhat slowly. Somewhat means something like a little. Now notice that somewhat
is actually giving us information about slowly - how slowly? Somewhat slowly. So
that's an adverb that gives information about another adverb, and there's yet
another one - 'very'. That adverb is giving us information about 'beautiful'. 'Beautiful'
is an adjective. OK so you see all the different kinds of
things that adverbs can do Alright the next part
of speech is the preposition Prepositions are words like in, on, at, by,
from, with, before and after. And these words help us to show relationships in
time, place and position. For example here's a common thing that we say to
people that we know a lot - "I'll see you at the office on Monday." There are two
prepositions in this sentence - can you say which those are? The prepositions are
at and on. The first preposition 'at' shows us the place. Where? At the office. And the
second proposition 'on' shows us the time When? On Monday. So that's what
prepositions do - they help us to show relationships in time, place and position.
Now students sometimes confuse prepositions with conjunctions but these are
very different. Conjunctions are words like and, but, or, so and because. And they
help to connect ideas - for example in the sentence "Clara and Jasmine best
friends." Can you say which the conjunction is? The
conjunction is 'and' and it helps to connect Clara and Jasmine both of which
are nouns. But conjunctions can even connect sentences. For example "I didn't
go to school today because I don't feel very well." Here there are two sentences - we call them
clauses. The second clause "I don't feel very well" is the reason and the first
Clause "I didn't go to school today" is the result. The conjunction here is
'because' and it shows us this reason and result relationship. notice that we can
also say "I don't feel very well today so I didn't go to school." In that case the
conjunction would be 'so'. Alright the last part of speech that we will look at is
the interjection. Interjections are words that have no real meaning but they help
us to show sudden emotion or exclamation. For example, the interjection Wow! shows excitement, surprise or
amazement. The interjection Argh! shows frustration or anger. Like if
I'm trying to open a jar of cookies or jar of pickles and I can't open it, I might say
Argh! I just can't do it. That shows I'm angry or I'm frustrated. Some other common
interjections are Ouch! Oops! Hey! and Hi! These last two words
are used when we meet someone or when we want to call out to
someone. For example I can say "Hi, how are you?" or "Hey John, over here. Look, I'm standing
over here!" So I want to call out to John. Alright so those are the eight parts
of speech Let's do a quick recap of what we've
learned today - we started with the verb The verb is a word that shows an action
or state - state means situation. A noun is a person, place, animal, thing, feeling or
idea. A pronoun replaces a noun and we use pronouns so that our speech is not
repetitive and more natural. Adjectives are words that give us information about
nouns or pronouns, and they answer questions like What kind? How many? What
color? What size? etc. Adverbs give us information about verbs or adjectives or
even other adverbs. Prepositions are words that help us to show relationships
in time, place or position. Conjunctions are words like and, but, because etc. and
they help us to connect ideas. Those can be nouns they can even be
verbs and even whole sentences - so you can connect any two ideas using conjunctions.
And finally interjections are words with no real meaning and they help us
to show exclamation or sudden emotion. Just remember that
these are used more commonly in speech and
not so much in writing. When we write them, we usually
put an exclamation mark. Alright so I hope you enjoyed this
lesson. Remember to subscribe to this channel
and I'll see you in the next lesson.
