Pulawski, Michigan TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

There are many parts of a sentence. Each part of a sentence has a word that describes it. In other words, we have categorized every word in language into a part of speech. These parts of speech include categories like noun, verb, adjective, adverb, gerund, and conjunctions. Nouns are either be countable or uncountable. Countable nouns can have an article proceeding them. Uncountable nouns cannot have an articles proceeding them because they are larger, and more general ideas of things. Examples of uncountable nouns might include music, intelligence, news, equipment, water, rice, beauty, ect. A noun can be countable and uncountable based on the way the word is used. For example, one can ask a friend if they like water (uncountable abstract idea of water in general), or they could ask their friend to pass them the water (a specific water that is physical and can be passed). In this lesson, I learned that uncountable nouns cannot have an 's' added to the end of them. Adjectives give details to nouns. More than one adjective can be used in a row and they usually come in the order:size-age-color-material. For example, "That big, white, wooden house is mine." Adjectives can be used to compare two nouns. These comparisons can be either a comparative or a superlative. Comparisons compare two nouns directly using than. For example, my hair is longer than Susie's hair. Superlatives are more extreme. My pencil is the best. This class is the worst. There are two kinds of articles: indefinite and definite. Although there is also a zero aticle where an article is not needed at all. Indefinite articles are more general (like how we now know that uncountable nouns are more general). Indefinite articles are 'a' and 'an.' While there is only one definite article- the. I learned that we determine whether to add an 'a' or 'an' before an indefinite article by the sound of the first letter of a word, and not the actual letter. For example university is proceeded by an a instead of an even though the first letter is a vowel. The reason for this is because the u in university sounds like a y which is a consonant. Verbs are the doing words. There are verbs of action like walk, talk, speech and there are verbs of being like have and own. There are a lot of irregular verbs that must be memorized when changing the verb into different tenses. There is a part of speech that I had never heard of before- the gerund which allows verbs to act as nouns. For example, in the sentence 'he admitting stealing the toy" the verb steal plus -ing makes the word a gerund. Another example is 'watching television does not burn many calories.' Watching is the gerund in that sentence. Adverbs add details to verbs. They add frequency, time, place, manner and degree. Sometimes, I do not know what to do, but slowly type the words on my computer. In that sentence, sometimes and slowly are the frequency and manner adverbs. I get possessive nouns and possessive adjectives confused. The difference is that possessive nouns take the place of nouns, while possessive adjectives describe nouns. Possessive pronoun example: That house is mine. What's mine is yours. Possessive adjective: That is my girlfriend. Overall, I learned that English has a lot of exceptions. I think that is a great way to explain American culture- we have a lot of exceptions in our lives. We take rules as guidelines and then do what we want with the language from there. We have exceptions because we want a flexible language just like our flexible schedules (for the most part). English is also a language that has many cultures combined into it. We have French words, German words, Japanese words. All of these different Coulter's words combined into one language needs flexibility, hence the crazy amount of exceptions that we have. Specific examples of exceptions in the language include adding -er to the end of adjectives to make comparisons, but sometimes needing another consonant added in there. Y is replaced by I when adding 'ed' to change the tenses of verbs. The most common words like good and bad are actually the adjectives that are irregular (good turns into better and best).