Teach English in XinAn Zhen - Maoming Shi

This section detail the parts of speech; the anatomy of sentences. It breaks down: Nouns: the names of objects and concepts. They can be common (example: cat) proper (example: Garfield) compound (example: comic book) abstract (example: greed) or collective (example: clowder. Nouns can be singular as in ?cat?, or plural as in ?cats?. Some are countable and have plural forms, or some are uncountable where the plural is the same as the singular. Adjectives, or describing words. These are arranged in an order that native English speakers may take for granted. ?the big, old, red, wooden barn? makes sense. ?the red, wooden, old, big barn? seems like gibberish. They can have comparative and superlative forms: (good: better, best) Articles are the glue that hold a sentence together. They can be definite (the) or indefinite (an) Verbs (doing words) can be transitive (followed directly by a noun) or intransitive (not followed by a noun). Infinitive verbs are preceded by a preposition (to eat, to run). And take different forms based on tenses (cry, cried, crying). And auxiliary verbs, which do not carry the main meaning and can be mistaken for articles (do, does, did) Adverbs, which describe verbs in the same way adjectives describe nouns. Gerunds, which are verbs converted to nouns, usually by adding ?ing? as a suffix (eating, buying) Pronouns, which are used as short placeholders for nouns. They can be personal (I, he, she) possessive (mine, his, hers) reflective (myself, himself, herself) or relative (whose) Prepositions which show the relationship between nouns and pronouns, and conjunctions that join words in sentences. The way sentences are formed can be taken for granted by native speakers, and I found this refresher on the parts of speech useful for this reason.