Grammar School Nsane Grammar School

[rudrax]

Was tiding up my bookmark's when found this interesting link ---

http://testyourvocab.com/ B)

Only words that I can clearly define - http://testyourvocab.com/?r=2384959

Words that I can use in a sentence, but don't exactly know the definition of, returned a value so obscene, that I'm refraining from linking that result on this thread. But I'm bookmarking that page anyways :P Seeing as native speakers know between 20,000-35,000 words (according to the site) most people wouldn't believe that number ;)

If all of us play fair (which I doubt) only that pseudo-linguist Alanon (Dutch test? WTF! :o ) ( showoff! :P ) should better me by some margin, methinks ;)

Well, I was too curious not to take the test. Played fair, I actually defined every word in my head not to allow contextual defining to meddle in. The last row was especially interesting, I'll be looking up some new words, I tell 'ya. :lol:

http://testyourvocab.com/?r=2385644

Pseudo-linguist? I hope not to be too related with them. xD I actually find linguistics annoying (not to say that I don't know it, in fact, I know it well - keep your enemies closer and all that.). :P

Yeah, Dutch. xD Finished my Russian exam a long time ago, now I'm taking a two-year Dutch course at my university, this is the first exam, still woefully entry-level. I have to memorize all these vegetables... I hate vegetables. :wut:

Oh well... I'm off then... Tot ziens!

If you don't mind, it'll be really a great idea to put vocabulary aside for a while and to concentrate on construction. Let us teach to build the skeleton first; the decoration is up to them as per their capacity.

Don't think that I'm forcing you. It's just an idea that could be constructive if approved by you :dance:

[Alanon]

If you don't mind, it'll be really a great idea to put vocabulary aside for a while and to concentrate on construction. Let us teach to build the skeleton first; the decoration is up to them as per their capacity.

Don't think that I'm forcing you. It's just an idea that could be constructive if approved by you :dance:

Heck, yeah. That's why the Faculty exists - so we could agree on the curriculum. ;)

So, what would you suggest for a couple of lessons for when I have time to write them? I ask because when given total freedom, I simply wouldn't know where to start, and you, having started, probably have a structure in mind, and I wouldn't want to screw up the logic of lectures with random grammatical postings. ;)

[rudrax]

If you don't mind, it'll be really a great idea to put vocabulary aside for a while and to concentrate on construction. Let us teach to build the skeleton first; the decoration is up to them as per their capacity.

Don't think that I'm forcing you. It's just an idea that could be constructive if approved by you :dance:

Heck, yeah. That's why the Faculty exists - so we could agree on the curriculum. ;)

So, what would you suggest for a couple of lessons for when I have time to write them? I ask because when given total freedom, I simply wouldn't know where to start, and you, having started, probably have a structure in mind, and I wouldn't want to screw up the logic of lectures with random grammatical postings. ;)

As you can see in the faculty, I'm just the founder. When I created the school, I was thinking that I will just suggest the blueprint and you guys will lead. Unfortunately, faculty members went busy or may be, they didn't find it interesting, whatever, I don't have a single piece of complain or disappointment on them because they are not getting paid for this. I wanted to be just a student to learn here. So, forget all this junk.

I am delivering lessons on The Tense and I will go as far I can, then I will halt. As for now, if you are interested, you are requested to get a lesson on The Parts of speech. As I have already started tense, someone may ask, "What is verb?".

And, many thanks for showing your interest, Alanon :)

[dcs18]

@Marik, You have made a serious grammar mistake at the first sentence of this post. Identify and correct it.

It's grammatical mistake, Hitler (BTW, when I commit the same - it's a grammatical error, not mistake . . . . . . . OK.) :hehe:

[rudrax]

@Marik, You have made a serious grammar mistake at the first sentence of this post. Identify and correct it.

It's grammatical mistake, Hitler (BTW, when I commit the same - it's a grammatical error, not mistake . . . . . . . OK.) :hehe:

Yeah, that should be "grammatical". But the "mistake" is correct. "error" is just another word which could be used too.

[rudrax]

Nice topic you have here rudrax. ;)

I'm sitting in front row alongside this cute girl. hehe! :dribble:

:welcome: to the school :)

[nIGHT]

C'mon guys! Bring more lessons, you got one diligent student here. ;)

[rudrax]

...continued from post #109

Past tense: It also has four categories:

• Simple past: Deals with the things that happened in the past. Construction: S + V (in past form) + O. For example: I did the work, He went there etc.

• Past continuous: Deals with the things that was / were happening in the past. Construction: S + was(if subject is singular number) / were(if subject is plural number) + V(-ing) + O. For example: I was doing the work, They were going there etc.

• Past perfect: Deals with the things that had happened in the past. Construction: S + had + V(in its participle form) + O. For example: He had done the work, They had gone there etc.

• Past perfect continuous: Deals with the things that had been happening in the past during a time period in the past. Construction: S + had + been + V(-ing) + O + since(if time period is very old) / for(if time period is not so old) + the time period. For example: She had been working on the project since two months, They had been playing cricket for an hour etc.

...to be continued.

[nIGHT]

Bring it on man! bring it on! I like more tenses as the relief from it is usually makes me feel great. :read:

[centserick2]

keep them coming lol...

[Alanon]

Parts Of Speech In English - Lesson One: The Noun

Linguists have classified the study of languages, namely the words of one language into categories, for easier study and analysis. English has at a minimum eight parts of speech, of which four are of the greatest importance. For the purpose of this lesson, I won't be giving any definitions, but try to explain them in the simplest possible way.

Types Of Nouns:

***Boring alert!!! If you don't need this, by all means, skip it!!!***

The most important ones are as follows:

Proper nouns are nouns which are simply put, written in capital letters. "Cuba", "India", "Africa", names such as "Fidel", "Adolf", "Joseph", "Francisco", also "The Bible", "The Kor'an", "English", "Dutch", "Polish"... "The Big Ben", "Windsor Castle", etc... you get the picture.

Common nouns are nouns which are ordinary. They refer to places, things, people in a general fashion... For example: "The nearest town is 10 kilometres away.", etc. Sometimes, you can make a proper noun into a common noun - when what you're talking about is universally known: I will meet you at the 5th Avenue.

Concrete nouns are the ones you can smell, touch, feel: "They took the dog to the beach.", or, "He removed the old book from the shelf. However, as they all refer to things in general, they are also common nouns. There is a problem in the English language over this, and this dilemma stands, because formally, the difference is vague.

Abstract nouns are the opposite of the concrete ones. "Justice", "thought", "sin",etc.

Compound nouns are composed out of one or several other words (other nouns, verbs, etc.). They may or may not have hyphens in between them: "policeman", "fireman", "warmonger", "fishmonger", "place-hold", "stronghold", "threshold", etc...

Possesive nouns change their form slightly, using apostrophe and the letter "s" to mark a relation between things. For example: "Michael's suitcase.", "My mother's favourite purse.", "Children's book.". When a noun already ends in the letter "s", only an apostrophe is added: "The bus' brakes stopped working!", "The janitors' rooms are to the left.". (Note: Some grammar practitioners allow for an s to be added in the first sentence (the sentence would be "The bus's brakes...", but there's disagreement on the matter). These rules, obviously, apply to both singular and plural nouns.

NOTE: The apostrophe +s differs from the short form of the word "is"! It may look the same, but the mechanism is different, and so is the meaning. Whenever you can't replace " 's " with "is", it means that you are dealing with possessive nouns.

On the gender of nouns:

This paragraph refers to nouns in English that have something to do with gender - that is to say humans or animals, as abstract nouns and nature-related ones haven't got this problem - you will almost always relate them to a person or animal.

Nouns in English are generally not gender-biased. That means that only a small number of nouns has a "male" and "female version", while others can refer to both women and men. For example, with humans: actor/actress, waiter/waitress - mostly in relation to occupations (Recently, there's been a trend to duplicate all compound nouns with "-men" at the end, providing a female counterpart: policeman/policewoman, salesman/saleswoman... it is considered "politically correct"). Other nouns, like judge, doctor, servant... can go either way, and without context there's nothing you can do. Finally, you have gender-specific words concerning animals, that without a doubt are one or the other: dog/bitch, mare/stallion, cow/bull, pigeon/dove, etc. Among the animal world, however, almost all non-domestic animals haven't got the male/female division - "hummingbird", "sparrow", "whale", "fox"...

Keep in mind - there are still meanings of nouns which refer to humans that are traditionally only related to males or females, and if used out of the ordinary, must be specially mentioned. For example: A butler is the head servant in a traditional English household. A starlet is a female parasite who constantly appears in the media without having an occupation related to the media. To call a woman a butler is equally unexpected as to call a man a starlet. The common phrasing would most likely be woman-butler or male starlet. Similarly, among animals, wolf is almost always male, and she-wolf is a compound noun designed to differ between the two.

On the plural of nouns:

One of the most important divisions between the nouns is their countability. Simply put, anything you can count has both a plural and singular form. This is a viewpoint that's different from the previous divisions, so by adding "-s", or "-es" to a countable noun, you can get it's plural form: butler/butlers, starlet/starlets, judge/judges, fox/foxes, noun/nouns, dog/dogs, but in compound nouns it follows the plural form of the second compound - policeman/policemen, fireman/firemen, stronghold/strongholds, etc. As you've noticed, some nouns like man/men, have an irregular plural form. Here's a table I stole demonstrating various irregular noun construction:

Of those you cant count, however, there is simply no plural form. Such is "sand", or "water", "air", "light", "oxygen"... they always take on singular verbs in sentences: "Sand is used in construction." and "Oxygen is the key to life.".

Finally, collective nouns are set between mass nouns and countable nouns. Like "a flock of sheep", or a "company committee", they are what we could, in theory, count, but view as a group nevertheless, and don't bother.

Whew! Took me a long time to compose this in an orderly fashion. There's much more that can be learned on nouns, and I hope I wasn't to technical. I won't say I hope I wasn't boring, because, let's face it, I was, there's only so much you can do with making grammar interesting. When I have more time, I'll continue the lectures on the remaining parts of speech. This detailed approach seemed more appropriate to me that the simplified, taxative one. Beginners won't need this all at once, but more curious students will hopefully find enough information to clarify some of the issues. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. Hope you like it! ;)

[calguyhunk]

Sentence Construction

You use sentence construction every day, but have you ever thought about what exactly a sentence is?

A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought.

In order to express a complete thought, every sentence must have two parts.
1. Subject (someone or something)
2. Predicate (what the someone or something is being or doing)
That's it! A sentence is just someone or something being or doing something. Simple, huh?
When we diagram sentences, you can always see those two basic parts. The stuff on the left side of the vertical line is the subject and the stuff on the right side of the line is the predicate.

Diagramming
Subjects & Predicates

Sentence diagramming is a visual way to show how the words in a sentence are related. Sentence diagrams will help you understand sentence construction.
Making sentence diagrams feels more like completing a word game than it feels like working on grammar.
You saw in the picture above how the basic diagram of a sentence works. The subject and verb go on a horizontal line and a vertical line divides them.
This is true of the very simplest type of sentence and the most complex type of sentence.
The picture below shows you a diagram of the Preamble to the United States Constitution.
It's just one sentence, and it's pretty complicated, but notice that in the upper left corner, you can see the vertical line dividing the subject and the predicate.

• Complete Subject = All of the words that tell us whom or what a sentence is about
• Complete Predicate = The verb and all of the words that modify or complete it

Don't worry too much about those things now. Just focus on the fact that even really complicated sentences are divided between the subject and the predicate! :thumbsup:

[Alanon]

Nice one! :D

[Airstream_Bill]

I just hope that everyone learns the word UNIQUE and its proper use. No one seems to know anymore that Unique is unto itself. It can not be Very, Most or plural. Just a gripe I have lived with most of my life listening to News People and other people use the word incorrectly. In saying that I use all kinds of words out of context. Ha! :duh:

[rudrax]

Parts Of Speech In English - Lesson One: The Noun

Linguists have classified the study of languages, namely the words of one language into categories, for easier study and analysis. English has at a minimum eight parts of speech, of which four are of the greatest importance. For the purpose of this lesson, I won't be giving any definitions, but try to explain them in the simplest possible way.

Types Of Nouns:

***Boring alert!!! If you don't need this, by all means, skip it!!!***

The most important ones are as follows:

Proper nouns are nouns which are simply put, written in capital letters. "Cuba", "India", "Africa", names such as "Fidel", "Adolf", "Joseph", "Francisco", also "The Bible", "The Kor'an", "English", "Dutch", "Polish"... "The Big Ben", "Windsor Castle", etc... you get the picture.

Common nouns are nouns which are ordinary. They refer to places, things, people in a general fashion... For example: "The nearest town is 10 kilometres away.", etc. Sometimes, you can make a proper noun into a common noun - when what you're talking about is universally known: I will meet you at the 5th Avenue.

Concrete nouns are the ones you can smell, touch, feel: "They took the dog to the beach.", or, "He removed the old book from the shelf. However, as they all refer to things in general, they are also common nouns. There is a problem in the English language over this, and this dilemma stands, because formally, the difference is vague.

Abstract nouns are the opposite of the concrete ones. "Justice", "thought", "sin",etc.

Compound nouns are composed out of one or several other words (other nouns, verbs, etc.). They may or may not have hyphens in between them: "policeman", "fireman", "warmonger", "fishmonger", "place-hold", "stronghold", "threshold", etc...

Possesive nouns change their form slightly, using apostrophe and the letter "s" to mark a relation between things. For example: "Michael's suitcase.", "My mother's favourite purse.", "Children's book.". When a noun already ends in the letter "s", only an apostrophe is added: "The bus' brakes stopped working!", "The janitors' rooms are to the left.". (Note: Some grammar practitioners allow for an s to be added in the first sentence (the sentence would be "The bus's brakes...", but there's disagreement on the matter). These rules, obviously, apply to both singular and plural nouns.

NOTE: The apostrophe +s differs from the short form of the word "is"! It may look the same, but the mechanism is different, and so is the meaning. Whenever you can't replace " 's " with "is", it means that you are dealing with possessive nouns.

On the gender of nouns:

This paragraph refers to nouns in English that have something to do with gender - that is to say humans or animals, as abstract nouns and nature-related ones haven't got this problem - you will almost always relate them to a person or animal.

Nouns in English are generally not gender-biased. That means that only a small number of nouns has a "male" and "female version", while others can refer to both women and men. For example, with humans: actor/actress, waiter/waitress - mostly in relation to occupations (Recently, there's been a trend to duplicate all compound nouns with "-men" at the end, providing a female counterpart: policeman/policewoman, salesman/saleswoman... it is considered "politically correct"). Other nouns, like judge, doctor, servant... can go either way, and without context there's nothing you can do. Finally, you have gender-specific words concerning animals, that without a doubt are one or the other: dog/bitch, mare/stallion, cow/bull, pigeon/dove, etc. Among the animal world, however, almost all non-domestic animals haven't got the male/female division - "hummingbird", "sparrow", "whale", "fox"...

Keep in mind - there are still meanings of nouns which refer to humans that are traditionally only related to males or females, and if used out of the ordinary, must be specially mentioned. For example: A butler is the head servant in a traditional English household. A starlet is a female parasite who constantly appears in the media without having an occupation related to the media. To call a woman a butler is equally unexpected as to call a man a starlet. The common phrasing would most likely be woman-butler or male starlet. Similarly, among animals, wolf is almost always male, and she-wolf is a compound noun designed to differ between the two.

On the plural of nouns:

One of the most important divisions between the nouns is their countability. Simply put, anything you can count has both a plural and singular form. This is a viewpoint that's different from the previous divisions, so by adding "-s", or "-es" to a countable noun, you can get it's plural form: butler/butlers, starlet/starlets, judge/judges, fox/foxes, noun/nouns, dog/dogs, but in compound nouns it follows the plural form of the second compound - policeman/policemen, fireman/firemen, stronghold/strongholds, etc. As you've noticed, some nouns like man/men, have an irregular plural form. Here's a table I stole demonstrating various irregular noun construction:

Of those you cant count, however, there is simply no plural form. Such is "sand", or "water", "air", "light", "oxygen"... they always take on singular verbs in sentences: "Sand is used in construction." and "Oxygen is the key to life.".

Finally, collective nouns are set between mass nouns and countable nouns. Like "a flock of sheep", or a "company committee", they are what we could, in theory, count, but view as a group nevertheless, and don't bother.

Whew! Took me a long time to compose this in an orderly fashion. There's much more that can be learned on nouns, and I hope I wasn't to technical. I won't say I hope I wasn't boring, because, let's face it, I was, there's only so much you can do with making grammar interesting. When I have more time, I'll continue the lectures on the remaining parts of speech. This detailed approach seemed more appropriate to me that the simplified, taxative one. Beginners won't need this all at once, but more curious students will hopefully find enough information to clarify some of the issues. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. Hope you like it! ;)

Thank you very much for your precious time, Alanon. This is very hard work. I know your range in language is vast but (apologies) audience may get long writings a bit boring. What I'm saying is, go brief. If someone needs a particular section of the brief to be elaborated, he will ask for it.

You can take an idea from my posts. Look at the tense, it's no way a small thing but I kept it brief.

Above lines are not intended to discourage you at any sense, I've just stated my personal idea and you may ignore that if you don't find it adequate. :)

[rudrax]

Sentence Construction

You use sentence construction every day, but have you ever thought about what exactly a sentence is?

A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought.

In order to express a complete thought, every sentence must have two parts.
1. Subject (someone or something)
2. Predicate (what the someone or something is being or doing)
That's it! A sentence is just someone or something being or doing something. Simple, huh?
When we diagram sentences, you can always see those two basic parts. The stuff on the left side of the vertical line is the subject and the stuff on the right side of the line is the predicate.

Diagramming
Subjects & Predicates

Sentence diagramming is a visual way to show how the words in a sentence are related. Sentence diagrams will help you understand sentence construction.
Making sentence diagrams feels more like completing a word game than it feels like working on grammar.
You saw in the picture above how the basic diagram of a sentence works. The subject and verb go on a horizontal line and a vertical line divides them.
This is true of the very simplest type of sentence and the most complex type of sentence.
The picture below shows you a diagram of the Preamble to the United States Constitution.
It's just one sentence, and it's pretty complicated, but notice that in the upper left corner, you can see the vertical line dividing the subject and the predicate.

• Complete Subject = All of the words that tell us whom or what a sentence is about
• Complete Predicate = The verb and all of the words that modify or complete it

Don't worry too much about those things now. Just focus on the fact that even really complicated sentences are divided between the subject and the predicate! :thumbsup:

Dear HOD, good work, indeed. You need to use this label in order to get your lessons to be entered in the indexes. And go brief :thumbsup:

[rudrax]

I just hope that everyone learns the word UNIQUE and its proper use. No one seems to know anymore that Unique is unto itself. It can not be Very, Most or plural. Just a gripe I have lived with most of my life listening to News People and other people use the word incorrectly. In saying that I use all kinds of words out of context. Ha! :duh:

Can you please elaborate the highlighted sentence? Thanks for your contribution though. :)

[rudrax]

Hey fellas, I have a query. Look at the following sentence:

He doesn't like explaining things.

Is the sentence grammatically correct?

[dcs18]

Hey fellas, I have a query. Look at the following sentence:

He doesn't like explaining things.

Is the sentence grammatically correct?

Yep, nothing wrong with that sentence - I'd personally add a comma right after the word 'like' (should be fine without the comma, too.)

[rudrax]

Hey fellas, I have a query. Look at the following sentence:

He doesn't like explaining things.

Is the sentence grammatically correct?

Yep, nothing is wrong with that sentence - I'd personally add a comma right after the word 'like' (should be fine without the comma, too.)

When a verb gets its continuous form in a sentence, I usually have found a 'be' verb before them. But in the sentence I had stated above there is no sign of 'be' verb before 'explaining'. If the sentence is grammatically correct, what's the rule for that?

[calguyhunk]

Dear HOD, good work, indeed. You need to use this label in order to get your lessons to be entered in the indexes. And go brief :thumbsup:

Done :thumbsup:

I just hope that everyone learns the word UNIQUE and its proper use. No one seems to know anymore that Unique is unto itself. It can not be Very, Most or plural. Just a gripe I have lived with most of my life listening to News People and other people use the word incorrectly. In saying that I use all kinds of words out of context. Ha! :duh:

Can you please elaborate the highlighted sentence? Thanks for your contribution though. :)

Unique is unique by itself. Something cannot be 'very' unique, 'most' unique or 'uniques' (sic) so as to speak :o The moment something is unique, it means - by definition - it is one and only. Nothing will ever be identical to it. So the reason for something to be 'very' unique or 'most' unique doesn't arise ;)

A similar mistake often made is "revert back" :angry: I see this a lot - especially amongst Indians :nono:

Revert itself means 'going back' as in, to revert is to 'go back'. Usage: Revert to Ex: "Please revert to the stock ROM if the custom ROM doesn't work". You don't revert back to it

So unless you want to go back back :tehe: please refrain from using revert back (sic) ;)

Similarly, either use in spite of (in and spite being two separate words) or despite. The phrasal preposition in spite of includes the word “of,” but the preposition despite does its job without “of.” Just don't write despite of (sic).

It makes no sense and makes you look like a fool :P

P.S. - There is the phrase in British English in despite of. It means “in defiance of.” But it's hardly ever used anymore these days ;)

[dcs18]

Hey fellas, I have a query. Look at the following sentence:

He doesn't like explaining things.

Is the sentence grammatically correct?

Yep, nothing is wrong with that sentence - I'd personally add a comma right after the word 'like' (should be fine without the comma, too.)

When a verb gets its continuous form in a sentence, I usually have found a 'be' verb before them. But in the sentence I had stated above there is no sign of 'be' verb before 'explaining'. If the sentence is grammatically correct, what's the rule for that?

I find guys going prudish on grammar only to end up sounding pretty artificial.

In my written & spoken language, I tend to rely less on the grammatical aspect and lay more emphasis on the brevity part - that's when one's character begins to surface. ;)

[calguyhunk]

Hey fellas, I have a query. Look at the following sentence:

He doesn't like explaining things.

Is the sentence grammatically correct?

Yes, it is. As in "He doesn't like playing cricket" or "He doesn't like dating good girls" :P

Yep, nothing wrong with that sentence - I'd personally add a comma right after the word 'like' (should be fine without the comma, too.)

No comma The comma is gonna kill it ;)

You add the comma only when "like" is used colloquially like a 12 year old American girl. EX: " Justin Beiber is so cute, that I'm like, you know, totally in love with him" :P Bad example, but you get the point ;)

The thing is, Like is sometimes used colloquially as a quotative to introduce a quotation or impersonation. It is often used to express that what follows is not an exact quotation but instead gives a general feel for what was said. In this usage, like functions in conjunction with a verb, generally be (but also say, think, etc.) :yes: EX: He was like, "I'll be there in five minutes."

[rudrax]

Hey fellas, I have a query. Look at the following sentence:

He doesn't like explaining things.

Is the sentence grammatically correct?

Yep, nothing is wrong with that sentence - I'd personally add a comma right after the word 'like' (should be fine without the comma, too.)

When a verb gets its continuous form in a sentence, I usually have found a 'be' verb before them. But in the sentence I had stated above there is no sign of 'be' verb before 'explaining'. If the sentence is grammatically correct, what's the rule for that?

I find guys going prudish on grammar only to end up sounding pretty artificial.

In my written & spoken language, I tend to rely less on the grammatical aspect and lay more emphasis on the brevity part - that's when one's character begins to surface. ;)

What sounds, that may not be correct (grammatically) and we are here to learn grammar (correctly).

[rudrax]

Hey fellas, I have a query. Look at the following sentence:

He doesn't like explaining things.

Is the sentence grammatically correct?

Yes, it is. As in "He doesn't like playing cricket" or "He doesn't like dating good girls" :P

What's the rule then?