The 8 Parts of Speech in English Grammar with Examples Quiz
(upbeat music)
- Hello everyone. And welcome
back to English with Lucy.
Today we are going back to basics.
We are looking at the building
blocks of spoken English.
I’m going to be talking to you
about the eight parts of speech.
Every single word you say
has a role within a sentence.
Every single word is a part of speech.
Today we’re going to be breaking it down
and looking at each one.
It makes up nearly everything
that we say in English.
So we might as well get it
right from the very beginning.
As always there is a free PDF
that goes with today’s lesson.
It’s got everything we’re
going to talk about today
plus a quiz,
I know you love quizzes
to test your learning.
If you’d like to download that,
just click on the link
in the description box,
you enter your name
and your email address.
You sign up to my mailing list
and the PDF will arrive
directly in your inbox.
And then every week after that,
you will automatically
receive my weekly lesson PDFs,
plus all of my news,
course offers and updates.
Before we get started,
I’d like to thank the
sponsor of today’s video,
it is NordVPN.
I always recommend watching TV
series and movies in English
as a language learning tool.
A really frustrating situation
is when you finally find a
TV show or a movie in English
that you really want to watch,
it’s a learning opportunity,
but then it’s blocked in your country.
I really enjoy watching
Spanish TV shows in Spanish,
and it’s so annoying when
they aren’t available
on any of my streaming
services here in the UK.
Well, NordVPN has the
solution, a very good solution,
a VPN hides your location,
allowing you to improve security,
but also allowing you to overcome
geographical restrictions,
meaning you can access all
of the streaming services
that aren’t usually
available in your country.
You can go on a map,
click on any location in
the world, and that’s it.
It takes you there.
It is literally that easy.
There also won’t be any annoying delays.
The speed tests have
confirmed that NordVPN
is the fastest VPN.
They have given me a special
offer to pass on to you.
To claim it just go to NordVPN.com/Lucy,
it’s risk-free to try it out
because they offer a 30
day money back guarantee.
You can get a two-year plan
plus four additional months
for a huge discount,
that’s 73% off plus four months for free.
Massive, right?
Let’s get started with the lesson.
Let’s talk about the first part of speech.
In my opinion, the most important nouns.
These are the bread and
butter of our speech,
which is ironic,
because bread and butter are both nouns.
A noun is something that name something,
such as a person, an idea or a thing.
In a sentence, a noun can
play the role of a subject,
an indirect object, a direct object,
a subject compliment,
an object compliment,
and a positive or an adjective.
There are so many
different types of nouns.
They can name people such as
a girl, Taylor Swift, my dad.
They can name a place, a
mountain, Spain, the kitchen.
They can also name things,
activities, concepts, processes,
ideas, such as love,
rugby, shorts, knowledge.
I actually have a video on
the 100 most important nouns
in British English.
I will link to that video
in the description box.
It’s quite a good one
if you want to quickly
acquire a lot of vocabulary.
Let’s move on to the second
part of speech: pronouns.
A pronoun is a word that’s
used instead of a noun
or a noun phrase.
You use them when the reader or listener
already knows the specific
noun that you’re referring to.
If I tell a story, for example,
about my fiancee William,
it will get so boring and repetitive
if I just say the noun
William, over and over again.
Let’s try, let’s see how it sounds.
William is my fiance.
William is extremely tall.
William told me that William
wants to marry me. (laughs)
It makes me sound obsessed
and weird to be honest,
and very repetitive.
Let’s try it with a
lovely pronoun instead.
William is my fiance. He’s very tall.
He told me he wants to marry me.
It sounds a little better,
less obsessive, less boring.
Now there are quite a few
different types of pronouns,
and some pronouns are found
in more than one category.
I will present you with
some of the most common.
We have the personal pronouns:
I, me, you, she, her, he,
him, us, we, they, them.
We also have the demonstrative pronouns.
I love the word
demonstrative, sounds posh.
They are: that, this, these and those.
We also have indefinite pronouns,
and these are used when the personal thing
doesn’t need to be
specifically identified.
For example, one, other,
everybody, anybody, nobody.
An example, everybody
loves my homemade brownies,
or some love marmite, others hate it.
Other types include
interrogative pronouns,
like who, what, which, and whose.
Progressive pronouns like
my, your, their, whose.
Reflexive and intensive pronouns
like myself, yourself, themselves.
And relative pronouns,
like whom, what, which.
Let’s move on to part of speech
number three, adjectives.
These might be my favourite actually.
These are the words that describe nouns,
and adjective can go right
before the noun it’s describing,
for example, my orange cat,
but it doesn’t have to.
For example, my cat is orange.
Now one of the most important
things that you can learn
when it comes to adjectives
is adjective order.
I feel like this is a sneaky secret.
That’s like the key to fluency,
only certain people know about this,
and once they learn it,
they’re like, “Oh, my word.”
It’s so secrets that many native speakers
don’t even know they’re using it.
But when you present them
with this information,
they are blown away,
because everyone follows the same order
without even thinking about it.
We’re not taught this in school.
I made a video all about this.
Again, I will link it
in the description box,
but I’ll give you a quick
summary from one to 10,
the order in which we
naturally say adjectives.
Number one, opinion; ugly, beautiful.
Number two, size; big, tall.
Number three, physical
quality; neat, rough.
Four, shape, for example, round or square.
Number five, age; old, new.
Number six, colour; pink, orange.
Number seven, origin; Egyptian, Japanese.
Eight, material; plastic, leather.
Nine, type; unisex,
four-legged, for example.
And number 10, purpose;
sewing, cooking, for example.
So I would talk about my
beautiful brown leather suitcase
or my big black Indian cooking pot.
I’ve got two little homework task for you.
Using what you’ve just learned there,
I would like you to write three sentences
using the correct adjective order,
describing three things that you can see
from where you are right now.
Please put that in the comment section.
Okay, part of speech number four, verbs.
Listen to me, write what you hear.
Learn to speak. (laughs)
Everything that is in bold here is a verb,
we use them all the time.
Verbs are words that describe actions.
We have dynamic or action verbs
that describe literal actions
like walking, running, singing.
We also have stative verbs that refer
to feelings in states
like to love, to think, to feel.
Auxiliary verbs are used in English
to change another verbs,
mood, voice, or tense.
This is why they’re referred
to as helping verbs.
The main auxiliary verbs
are be, have, and do.
We also have modal auxiliary verbs,
commonly called modals or modal verbs.
These are a big pain point
for many students learning English
because they’re so
annoying, they are annoying.
Modals are added to another
verb to show capability
or possibility or necessity as well.
Common examples are may,
might, must, can, could,
should, and shall, and would, and will.
Ought is also an important one too.
I made a video a very, very
long time ago about modal verbs,
so you can click on it to
laugh about how young I was,
I think I was 21.
Yeah. I was 21 when I started
teaching English on YouTube,
and I’m now 27.
Can you believe that?
And by the time this video
comes out, I will be married.
I’m not married right now,
but yes, my wedding
hopefully will have passed.
I will put a link to that modals video
in the description box,
but maybe that’s something
I ought, modal verb,
to recreate soon.
Let me know if you’d like
a video about modal verbs.
One last part of this
segment, phrasal verbs.
I hear you’re grown. I’ve heard
you’re all grown. (laughs)
Everyone seems to find
phrasal verbs so annoying,
and they’re really, really frustrating,
but I really enjoy teaching them.
These are phrases that
act as a single verb,
they usually consist of
a verb and a preposition.
I have made so many videos over the years
about phrasal verbs.
I’ll list a few of my favourites
in the description box
down below as well.
Right. Number five,
let’s talk about adverbs.
Adverb is a word that
describes an adjective, a verb,
another adverb, or even a sentence.
Have a look at these examples:
I gently lifted him out of bed.
Here the adverb is describing a verb.
He is more interesting than you,
that is an unusually tool tree.
There the adverb is
describing the adjective.
Unfortunately, we had already left.
Unfortunately, the adverb is
describing the whole sentence.
Okay, let’s move on to prepositions.
Another topic that learners of English
tend to find quite tricky.
A preposition is a word
that tells you when or where
something is in relation
to something else.
It tells you the relationship
between words in a sentence.
I put my bag on the table.
I sat beside the wall.
My birthday is on Monday.
Now let’s take this
opportunity to bust a myth.
I hate this myth so much,
it annoys me all the time.
I have lots of students and
viewers in my comment section
telling me off,
because they’ve been mistaught
about this myth by their teachers.
Some people are adamant that
you should never end a sentence
with a preposition and they are wrong.
And teachers say this and it bugs me.
What do you think sounds more natural?
Where do you come from?
Or from where do you come? (laughs)
From where do you come?
It sounds beautiful for game of Thrones.
Where do you come from,
from being a preposition
at the end of sentence
sounds absolutely fine.
That’s where you went to!
What else am I meant to say?
That is to where you went! No.
An example, are you going to the party?
I don’t know who I’m going with.
You could say, I don’t
know with whom I’m going,
but it’s just too formal.
So yes, there are many occasions
when using a preposition
to end a sentence is wrong,
especially in formal
writing or formal speech.
Don’t let pedants make
you scared to speak.
Part of speech number seven, conjunctions.
A conjunction is a word that’s
used to connect clauses,
sentences or words together.
Firstly, let’s look at
coordinating conjunctions.
They allow us to join
words, phrases or clauses
of equal rank.
The most common coordinating conjunctions
are FANBOYS. (laughs)
No, literally, for, and,
nor, but, or yet, so.
FUNBOYS, that’s a great
way to remember them.
Here we have two sentences
or clauses of equal rank:
I had a terrible headache.
I still went to school.
We can join them together
with a coordinating clause.
I had a terrible headache,
but I still went to school.
We also have correlative conjunctions.
These are pairs that work
together like either and or,
or neither and nor.
I want either the beef
or the turkey roast.
There are also subordinating conjunctions,
which join dependent and
an independent clause.
Common subordinating
conjunctions are: because, since,
as, although, though, while
or whilst, and whereas.
I ate dinner because I was hungry.
I drove while talking on the phone.
Finally, we have number eight,
the eighth part of speech, the articles,
very important part of speech.
The definite article is the word the.
It limits the meaning of a
noun to one particular thing.
Give me the ticket.
I am talking about a specific ticket
that both of us know about,
the ticket, not a ticket, not
another ticket, the ticket.
The indefinite article is a or an,
a or an.
It is a when it proceeds a word
that begins with a consonant
or it is an, or an,
when it proceeds a word
that begins with a vowel.
The indefinite article
indicates that a noun
refers to a general thing, a general idea,
rather than a specific thing.
Can you pass me an apple?
Note that I said an ‘cause
it starts with a vowel sound.
Should I bring a bottle of wine tonight?
Not the bottle of wine.
Should I bring the bottle of wine
implies that it’s a very
special bottle of wine
that we both know about.
No, a bottle of wine, any bottle of wine.
Right. That is it for my lesson
on the eight parts of speech.
I hope you enjoyed it, and I
hope you learned something.
Now it’s time for you
to complete the quiz.
If you’d like to complete the quiz,
just download the PDF,
what you’ve got to do is click on the link
in the description box.
You enter your name
and your email address.
Sign up to my mailing list,
and it comes directly to your inbox.
Don’t forget to check out the sponsor
of today’s video, NordVPN.
Just head to NordVPN.com/Lucy.
Don’t forget to connect with
me on all of my social media.
I’ve got my Instagram, my
website, englishwithlucy.co.uk,
where I’ve got a fabulous
pronunciation tool.
You can click on phonemes
and hear me pronounce them,
and hear me pronounce words
that contain those phonemes i, word, no.
I’ve also got my personal channel
where I document my life here
in the English Countryside.
All of my blogs are fully subtitled,
so you can use them for listening practise
and to improve your vocabulary.
I will see you soon for another lesson.
Mwah.
(upbeat music)