Hello and welcome back to our parts of speech series My name is Ganesh and in this lesson we're going to learn all about adjectives. In this lesson I will tell you what is an adjective and what are the two main types of adjectives and then we will focus on using adjectives correctly and how to avoid common mistakes that students make with them. We will look at three areas: ed and ing adjectives, comparatives and superlatives and the order of adjectives - that is when you have more than one adjective in a sentence, which should you put first second etc. So we'll talk about avoiding errors in these three areas. Before we start just remember if you have any questions at all you can ask me in the comments section below and I will talk to you there. OK so first of all what is an adjective? Well that's easy - an adjective is a word that gives information about a noun or pronoun. In grammar we say that an adjective modifies a noun or pronoun modify here means to change the noun or pronoun by giving more information about it. For example take a look at this sentence There are three small black wooden chairs in this room. Focus on the noun chairs and can you tell me which adjectives modify - that is give more information - about chairs? The adjectives are three, small, black and wooden. These adjectives answer questions like How many? What size? What color? What material? etc. Now in this example the adjectives occur before the noun but they can also appear after the noun or pronoun like in this example - The food was hot and delicious. Here the adjectives hot and delicious appear after the noun food and notice that we use the linking verb be - past tense was - to connect the noun and the adjectives. OK now that you know what an adjective is let's talk about the two types of adjectives in English There are two main types of adjectives in English - these are called determiners and descriptive adjectives. Or as I like to say less interesting and more interesting adjectives. I say that descriptive adjectives are more interesting because these are what we commonly think of as adjectives - words like beautiful, big, small, tall, short, blue, red etc. So what are determiners then? Well determiners are a small group of grammar words that act as adjectives. Words like my, our, your, his, her etc. are determiners When I say - That's my car, for example, the word my shows that I'm not talking about any car - I'm talking about one particular car - my car - so the word my acts as an adjective by giving information about the noun car. In the same way the words this, that, these and those also act as adjectives. Also the question words what, which and whose can be determiners. If I asked - Which team do you think will win the next match? - the word which asks for information about team. Team is a noun so which is an adjective. Quantity words like numbers and quantity expressions such as a few, some and many are determiners as well. And finally articles that is the words a, an and the are also considered adjectives because if I said - A window is broken - it could be any window but if I said - The window is broken - we both know which window I'm talking about so articles give us information about nouns and so they're also adjectives. Now all determiners are adjectives but we will discuss these in other lessons because each one of them is a big topic. In this lesson we're going to focus on the really interesting adjectives that is descriptive adjectives and we will look at how to avoid common errors with them. Now in English there are lots and lots of descriptive adjectives - some of them are formed from nouns, verbs and even other adjectives. These are usually straightforward meaning that they're easy to use but one area where students commonly make mistakes is adjectives formed from verbs using the endings ed and ing. Have a look at this chart - on the left you see three ing adjectives and on the right three ed adjectives. The adjectives boring and board are formed from the verb bore, confusing and confused from the verb confuse and exciting and excited form from the verb excite. Now you see three sentences on the screen. In each sentence I want you to put an ing adjective in one blank and the ed adjective in the other blank. There's a clue at the end of each sentence to help you. Stop the video now if you'd like think about your answers then play the video and check. OK now before I give you the answers let's first understand the difference between ed and ing adjectives - the difference is this - ing adjectives always show cause or reason and ed adjectives show effect or result, so in the first sentence My wife and I went to see a movie. The movie was boring, so we were bored. The movie was the reason or cause and our feeling - bored - was the result or the effect. In the same way in number 2 - The students felt really confused because the professor's lecture was so confusing. And in number 3 - The story was exciting and the children were excited to hear it. Did you get all of these right? OK so just remember that ing adjectives will always express cause and ed adjectives will express effect Let's now turn to the second area where mistakes are very common and that is comparatives and superlatives What are comparatives and superlatives? Well these are words that help you to compare nouns - people, places, animals things etc and we do that using adjectives. Comparatives are found in this form - more or less + an adjective + than or as + adjective + as and this means that the two nouns we are comparing are equal. Superlatives appear as most or least + adjective To understand these we're going to take the example of some popular cars - the Honda Civic, the Ford Mustang and the Chevrolet Corvette. Let's say that Civic is $20,000, the Mustang is 45,000 and the Corvette is $60,000 Now let's compare these cars using the adjective expensive. On the screen there are a few sentences and once again I would like you to fill in the gaps with the correct comparative or superlative form. Pause the video if you want, try the exercise and then play the video and check. Alright let's look at the answers - The Corvette is more expensive than the Mustang. So that means The Mustang is less expensive than the Corvette. But The Mustang is more expensive than the Honda Civic, so The Civic is less expensive than the Mustang. The Corvette is the most expensive of the three cars and The Civic is the least expensive of the three cars Remember I told you we could also use the form as + adjective + as to mean that two nouns are equal in some way? Well let's say that the Ferrari is also $60,000, that means the price of the Ferrari and the Corvette are the same so we can say - The Ferrari is as expensive as the Corvette. So what kinds of mistakes students make with comparatives and superlatives? Well mistakes commonly occur in the ER EST and irregular forms of adjectives. With some adjectives instead of saying more and most we add the endings ER and EST. For example we don't say more cheap, we say cheaper and we say cheapest not most cheap. In the same way we have big bigger biggest small smaller smallest and so on. Some adjectives are called irregular because you cannot guess their comparative and superlative forms. For example to compare using the adjective good we don't say good gooder and goodest - we say better and best. Similarly do you know the comparative and superlative forms of bad? Bad worse and worst. So with these in mind here are a few example sentences all of them have mistakes in them. I would like you to stop the video now think about how you would correct these sentences and then play the video and check. OK in the first sentence the error is that an ER form - taller - is used along with more. Remember that the word taller means more tall so if you say more taller that's like saying more more tall which doesn't make sense so the correct way to say this is to just say Maya is taller and Sarah. Remember that whenever you use an er form don't put more before it. In the same way when you have an EST form don't put most in front of it. So in number 2 we have an EST form - richest - but we also have most. We'll need to remove that so - Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. In number three the problem is slightly different because we have less we cannot say less easier because again easier means more easy so it's like saying less more easy which makes no sense. A better way to say this would be Learning Korean is more difficult than learning Spanish - instead you could also say harder or even - Learning Korean isn't as easy as learning Spanish. And finally what about number four? Here the problem is the word beautifulest actually there's no such word. We cannot say beautifuler and beautifuler - the adjective beautiful does not have those forms instead we have to say more beautiful and most beautiful so - This is the most beautiful garden I have ever seen. Alright so remember not to make any of these mistakes. Let's now move on and look at the third and final area where students commonly make mistakes with adjectives and that is the order of adjectives What do I mean by order of adjectives? Well in English when you have more than one adjective describing a noun there's usually a fixed order in which to put those adjectives and the mistake that students often make is that they sometimes put adjectives in the wrong order Let's take an example - In my home I have a tablecloth - you know a cloth that you put on a table before you put any food on the table - this table cloth is from France, it's blue in color it's not very big - it's small and it's also quite old It's made from cotton, oh its round in shape and it's beautiful Now your job is to put all of these adjectives in the correct order before the noun tablecloth. Pause the video if you want, think about the order and then play the video again and check. Alright here's how you order adjectives in English - if we have a determiner we put it first remember that determiners are grammar words that act as adjectives. In this sentence the determiner is a so it's at the beginning of the sentence. e then say our opinion - in this case that's the word beautiful, then comes size - small then shape - round. After that we put age, in this case - old, then comes color - blue and then origin - my tablecloth is from France so French. We can then say what material its made of - cotton, and finally we can include its purpose if we want. Now if we were talking about a cleaning liquid for example the word cleaning would be its purpose. In the case of the tablecloth we don't have a purpose so we don't need to include it. So the final order of adjectives here is - In my home I have a beautiful small round old blue French cotton tablecloth. OK let me say here that it's not very common to have so many adjectives in one sentence and it's not good because for your listener it's too much information. But this example was just to show you how we order adjectives in English. So now on the screen there are a couple more examples your job is to put the adjectives in the correct order in each sentence. Stop the video, think about your answer, then play the video again and check. OK in the first sentence we should say - Yesterday I met a well-dressed young Japanese man. The word well-dressed is an opinion so it comes first, age comes next - young, and finally origin - Japanese. In number 2 - Jared owns two expensive yellow German sports cars. Notice here that sports is the purpose so it comes last. Did you get both of those right? If you did - fantasticm, but if you didn't don't worry because this topic is often quite difficult at the beginning but you will get better at it with time and practice OK before we finish this lesson let's do a quick recap of what we've learned here today. We first learned about the two main types of adjectives - determiners which are a group of grammar words that act as adjectives and descriptive adjectives - what we can think of as the real adjectives. Then we looked at ed and ing adjectives - remember that ing adjectives show cause or reason and ed adjectives show effect or result. Then we turned to comparatives and superlatives. Do you remember the common errors that we discussed? The errors are using er forms with more and est forms with most. Remember not to do that And finally we learned the order of adjectives - determiner, opinion, size, shape, age, color, origin, material and purpose The error is to mix up this order so it's a good idea for you to memorize it Alright i hope you enjoyed this lesson and learned a lot from it Remember to subscribe to this channel and I will see you in the next lesson
