English Lesson 101

Hey there. Aside from being an "artist" I also do a full time acting course. Which is now into its third week. During one of our warm ups, were asked to come up with a three letter noun. The thing is... I have no idea what a noun is! And then I figured, it would be fun to ask you guys here, on the helper. ...instead of google 'ing' the phrase. So how well do you know your English?

Also... What is the meaning of a verb, pro-noun and... (there are others). But I don't know there names. You can clearly see that I'm not very well educated in this department. It all goes into how English was for me at School. (...But that's another story)

Verb - a word that indicates action. "I run fast"

Noun - A thing. Usually defined as a person, place, thing, or idea. "I picked up a book."

Pronoun - Substitution for a noun with something that is more generic. "He went to the store." Rather than saying the person's name, we use "he" - that's a pronoun.

Adjective - A descriptive word. Adjectives modify, or describe, nouns. "The car is red."

Adverb - A descriptive word. Adverbs describe verbs or other adverbs. "The dog barked loudly." Many adverbs end in -ly.

Preposition - A word that begins a phrase that modifies something in the sentence, but can't stand on its own. "She walked around the block." "Around" here is the preposition, and "around the block" is what is referred to as a 'prepositional phrase'. Notice that the phrase is describing where she walked. Prepositions typically have some sort of description like this.

Conjunction - Word that links two similar items together in a sentence. Conjunctions are typically found in compound sentences, compound subjects, etc. "He and she took a ride together."

Interjection - A word used as an exclamation in a sentence or clause. "Oh, that sounds nice." "Yikes! You scared me!"

Those are the 8 parts of speech. I'd start there if you're interested in learning some grammar.

A noun is any person, place, or thing. Sample 3-letter nouns:

• Cat
• Dog
• Man
• Air
• Bog

A verb is usually some sort of action, such as:

• run
• walk
• jump
• fly
• type
• eat

A pronoun is a substitute for a noun one would use in regular speech usually used to refer to a particular person, such as:

• He
• She
• I
• Me
• They
• Him
• Her
• Us
• We

Other "parts of speech" (the proper term for these words) include:

• Adjective: A word used to describe a noun ("beautiful" woman)
• Adverb: A word used to describe a verb ("He ran "swiftly")
• Preposition ("in", "with", "from", "until", "of"):
• Conjunction: A word used to join two sentences together ("And", "Or", "But", "So"):
• Interjection: A word that is used to convey emotion ("Wow!")
• Article ("A", "An" or "The")

There are probably more, but I actually wouldrecommend reading up on this if you are curious. Many English sentences can follow a particular pattern, such as:
Noun Verb Adverb: John drives slowly.

Hey! Cool these are great responses. Thanks for the effort. I mostly enjoyed the different ways darthfett and ghan explained the same thing. Ill refer back to these a lot.

Darthfett said:

Many English sentences can follow a particular pattern, such as:

Noun Verb Adverb: John drives slowly.

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Actually, they follow the S-V-O sentence pattern. More info can be given with the following links:

Sentence diagram
Linguistic typology
Word order

If you learn all of these, you'll master most of English. The rest would be spelling and punctuations.

@Sock: Were are you from? Is english not your native language?

Accname said:

@Sock: Where are you from? Is english not your native language?

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If so, Sock has pretty good grammar.

KaerfNomekop said:

If so, Sock has pretty good grammar.

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Since Sock does a full-time acting course, I'm sure English has to be at or above a certain level in order to get a good grade.

Hey. Yeah I'm English. Australian actually. I feel I should probably know these terms better than I do. I never concentrated in class because I was always drawing in my books instead of writing XD