Learn English Grammar: 10 Types of Nouns

Hi. James from engVid. Today, I'd like to discuss person, place, and thing. Yeah, that's

right. E... Okay. Today, we're going to talk about nouns. Today, what I would like to let

you know are there are ten nouns. "E" is referring to the fact that most of us have been taught...

I'm a native speaker, and actually, I was born in England, live in Canada. I was taught

it's person, place, and thing. That was our basic education for it. But there are actually

ten different categories of nouns. And today, we're going to take a deep dive, and I mean

go deep into it, separate them so that it will help you become a better writer and communicator

in English. This is actually a good brush up for native speakers as well. All right?

Let's go to the board. All right, so, as you can see, I have my weird flower here. This

is actually a mind map. I made it like a flower because with the petals, each petal tells

a different story. And when I go through each one, it'll help you remember. So, it may look

a little bit weird now, but by the time we're done, it'll be in your mind.

Let's start off with number one. There are ten types of nouns. The most common one we

have - and I use the word "common", it's called a common noun - are things in everyday life.

An example of this is "house", "a canyon". If you think of a mountain, it goes like this.

A canyon is the other way. It goes... It dips down. Okay? So, think of a mountain reversed

where the land is here and there's kind of a hole in it. Okay? A canyon. And "girl".

These are everyday objects and items. Well, maybe not a canyon, but you understand what

I'm saying. There's nothing special about them. They're generic.

When we move to the second petal, we have what's called proper nouns. This is when we

are talking about specific examples of these things. What do I mean? Well, you can have

a house, but we all know, or most of the people on the planet know, of the White House in

the United States of America where the President is. You'll notice that the difference between

a proper noun and a common noun is capitalization. There is a capital put on the words. We use

it to say... Sorry. These are very specific words. They do this in German language as

well, by the way. They capitalize nouns, so you know this is a thing in the sentence,

so you know its function. Just a little aside, because knowledge is power. Anyway. So, my

house becomes the White House. That's right. Second black president. Not going to happen.

Okay. Now, also, "canyon", I talked about that. Well, in the United States of America,

several millions of people visit the Grand Canyon. It is one of the biggest canyons in

the world, and people go to visit it. I mean, some of these places are almost like reverse

mountains. You could put a mountain in that hole. Okay? Notice the capitalization. And

I put "Nino", because Nino is a girl, but she's a specific girl, so she has to have

a capital. Kind of cool? So, now we have common and proper, knowing that common is everyday

things like camera, right, versus Nikon camera, which would be a proper noun.

Now, let's look at single nouns. You notice I have the number one. A single noun is any

one thing. Singular. Cat. Man. Marker. Right? Easy enough. What happens when we have more

than one? Well, I've got plus one, and we've got plural nouns. Now, the interesting thing

about a plural noun is it's not just one, because you can have, see, "marker" becomes

"markers". That's more than one. We add an "s". Sometimes we add an "es" to the end of

the word, right? Those are what we call regular plural nouns.

So, what's the irregular one you're asking? This is what I was saying. This is even good

for native speakers. An irregular plural noun is something where we don't add an "s" or

an "es", but it might be very different indeed. Notice here I have "cat". If you have more

than one cat, you'll have "cats". That would be a regular... That would be a regular plural

verb. But then I have "foot". Some of my students would say, "Oh, teacher, you have foot? Then

you have the feet, the foots." Right? I'm like, "No, you have feet." You will notice

that the "feet" is very different. It has an "eet", there is no extra "s" or extra "es".

So, irregular verbs take on the form of, like for instance, a "tooth", one "tooth" becomes

"teeth". Right? They are different in nature that you cannot just add an "s" to it, you

actually have to change the word. All right? Another one could be "person". It's one person.

"People". What? Yeah, one person, five people. There's no "s", it's not "persons". Actually,

there's an exception that I'll go into another time when you go into elevators. That's in

another lesson I actually did before. Only place you actually see "persons" is on legal

documentation and in elevators. I don't make the language up, I'm just here to explain

it to you. All right? Otherwise, it's "person" is one, "people" is the plural.

We talked about regular... I'm sorry, plural and singular and proper and common nouns.

Let's go to this one, "concrete nouns". What's a "concrete noun"? Well, this wall I'm working

with is made of concrete, so people will tell you it's where you drive your car or the sidewalk.

In this case, a "concrete noun" is one that you can have with your senses. You can see

it with your eyes, you can smell it, you can taste it, you can touch it. All right? Did

I miss one? You can hear it. These are "concrete nouns". Examples of "concrete nouns" are apples,

cats, roses, because you can smell a rose as well as see it. These are "concrete". They're

in the physical world. Now, what about other nouns? And this is when people have a problem

with writing on how to address them, because we have other nouns, and sorry, I should say,

right now, all the times I've been talking to you about plural nouns, single, proper

and common nouns, I've been basically talking about "concrete nouns". All right?

When we move over, and this is where people have difficulties with the language, especially

people learning it, is with abstract nouns. These are ideas, and these are emotions. "Anger".

"Anger", right? So, when people say, "Okay, anger, what is that?" Well, it's a noun. He

can have anger, right? You can be angry, descriptive, but you can have anger. "Noun". Oh, yeah,

it's a noun. And also, "ideas". "Democracy". It's an idea. It's a noun. All right?

Next, we go from these things... Oh, sorry, I should also say, these are things that you

cannot use your five senses, and that's where we can tell the difference here. You cannot

see democracy. You can see examples of democracy. You can see people vote, right? You can see

institutions to protect law and order, but you can't say, "That's democracy. I can show

you and hold it to you and give it to someone." It's an idea that we use in different means,

and you can see examples of it, but you can't say, "Here is this democracy. I give it to

you." Okay? And that's the difference between a concrete idea, an apple, which I can give

you, and an idea like anger. You can see an example of it, but it cannot be touched, tasted,

da-da-da. You know what I'm saying.

Number seven. This is going by fast. "Collective". If you watch Star Trek, the collective is

the Borg. The Borg is a collective, but we live now, unfortunately. And any collective

is a group. If you have a crowd, these are collective nouns, groupings of things, usually

people, but groups. You can have what? You can have a collective of a team. If you've

got 10 people playing on a team, I don't know any sports, really, so I don't know what team

has 10 people. Nine people on a baseball team, I think. I think. Anyway, and everyone has

just lost lots of respect for me now. He doesn't know. Sorry, I do other things. Play chess.

Anyway, so team is about a group. A crowd is a group, a collection of people. So even

though it's a single thing, a crowd is made up of many things, and that's important to

notice when you talk about it. When you can say "America's team", they'll say "the team",

the team, which is an article that says something specific and singular, but we know it's made

up of more than one person. Yeah? And the crowd, it was the largest crowd in inaugural

history in the United States in 2016. All right? It wasn't the largest crowd. It was

25 people. I mean, there was about 1,000, I'm sure, but it was a group. All right? Collective.

Moving on. Compound nouns. These are your interesting ones, and you'll notice I have

this little minus sign. It's not a negative sign. It's not a minus sign. It's a hyphen

sign, and I've got to be honest. I've got to be honest. I am the worst with that because

a lot of times, there are words that I know, but I've never written. For instance, when

I was looking down for "dry cleaning", I would write "dry cleaning" and not realize

it's "dry-cleaning". So, compound nouns are a combination of two words. It could be either

with a hyphen, which means two words put together, like "dry-cleaning", or something that you

would never think about that we say all the time, "bookstore". "Bookstore" is a combination

of two words. The reason for the two words is to give a greater descriptive power. Yes,

I want my clothes cleaned, but maybe it's made of leather, and leather doesn't go well

with water, so I need "dry-cleaning". And when someone says they do that, I know my

leather is safe. What about a store? There are different types of stores. There are tire

stores, there are bookstores, there are computer stores, but I need to get books, so I want

to go to something well-defined, "bookstore". And that's the use of compound words.

Now, interesting history. Over time, some words that are separated by a hyphen will

eventually - they drop the hyphen and just make it one word, simply because it's in a

lot of use and it saves time. So, who knows? Maybe one day my "dry-cleaning" could be one

word. [Laughs] I doubt it.

Okay. Now, the last two I want to talk about is something that most people learn, funny

enough, as English learners, but native speakers don't necessarily know. I know it sounds

odd, but it's something we just know internally, but we don't actually think about consciously.

Right? And these are our countable words. Now, one, two, three, four - it sounds like

a song, I'll give you some more - things you can count. "Fingers" and "toes", and even

my nose. I have one nose, five fingers, and I have 14 toes. I'm not from here. Not from

these parts, anyway. Okay? Things you can actually count.

Now, I'm going to give you - oh, no, that's later on. I've got my bonus section. I've

got something interesting for you. It's tasty. You'll like it. Things you can count, anything

literally, and we can go back over to our senses or our concrete nouns, are generally

going to be countable. Generally, not always. We're going to get up here and we're going

to talk about things that you have as an everyday experience, and you'll go, "James", I go,

"I got you covered." All right? So, generally, things that we touch and play with a lot are

countable nouns. We can go back to our house, our girl, our cat, our teeth. They're all

countable.

But what about those things that theoretically aren't countable? Like what? Water. Uncountable

nouns are those things that when we do count, we don't count the thing, we measure the quantity

of it. Salt, water, money, where you can count it. It's like we count bills, but there's

too much money in the world to actually count. In fact, if the average person wanted to count

a billion dollars, one dollar at a time, you would die before you could count it. One dollar

at a time. Too much. But you would die happy. One for me, one for you. One for me, one for

you. Anyway, joke.

So, these are uncountable, and I have counted now. I've gone to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,

9, 10, and got all the nouns or the types of nouns that you will encounter when you're

studying English. All right? Now, giving you this doesn't mean anything if you can't use

it. So, let's go to the board. For the second time, I'm going to do our quiz. Are you ready?

And we are back. We're going to go from... Well, we learned ten. I'm going to quiz you

on five. As a bonus, I'm going to teach you two extra words that you might be confused

on, and sometimes native speakers get confused on this one, and then we have our homework

as per usual. All right? So, let's go to the board and do our quiz.

I told you about different types of nouns, so I'm going to give you examples of the nouns

now, and what you're going to do is you're going to tell me what kind of noun it would

be. So, let's start off with the first one. Nouns that are ideas. You can talk about anger,

intelligence, democracy. You can't use them with your five senses. What kind of nouns

are these? Mm-hmm. Remember I told you I work in a place where we got concrete floors? Well,

when something's not concrete, it is abstract ideas. Right? And these are things you cannot

hold in your hand. You cannot see them and touch them, but you can see examples of them

and say this... I know someone has anger when their face is red, they're breathing heavy,

they have a lot of intensity. Those are examples of anger, but not anger itself.

What about this one, number two? Nouns that describe a group of things. A team, a crowd,

a committee. I didn't give you committee before. I like this word, committee. It's really strange

to me because you look, it's got two M's, two T's, and two E's. It's a weird English

word. We just doubled everything. They got lazy. So, a committee is a group of people

that get together, decide something. Right? So, for instance, you can have a committee

of... We in Canada, we have a health and safety committee, which will be four or five people

from different areas of a company that would get together and talk about the safety of

a building and the health of the workers there. Right? So, in case you don't know the word

committee. Crowd, group of people, and a team can be anything from a professional sports

team to a group of people you work with at your office, and they're a team, you know,

the accounting team or branch, whatever. What kind of noun is that, though? In old Soviet

Russia, we would call this the... That's right. The collectives. The collected group. They

come together, and they're a single noun. Don't forget. Even though they represent plural

things, it's a singular noun. You don't talk about team because you can say teams, and

that means a group, but more, like five, six of these particular groups. Right?

Now, what about names for specific things, like Toronto, Nino, and Ford? Ford is rather

interesting. Right now, the Premier of Ontario is Doug Ford. Yeah? Cool. It's also a car.

Very specific. That's why I've got a capital, here. Now, back to you.

Now, these are called... English people will love me when I say this, and I mean English

from England. They're called proper nouns. It's a proper noun. It's not like those other

general nouns. It's a proper noun. You get a proper slap. Interesting story that happened.

I was in England, and there was this lady, and she was talking a lot, and there's a couple

behind me from... They were British, and this one guy turns to this woman, and I'm hearing

it, and I'm almost laughing. He said, "That woman talks way too much. She deserves a proper

slap to move her on." I was like, "What is a proper slap?" He said, "Two seconds. Is

it a backhat?" Funny story that actually happened. Anyway, that's why I said British people will

like that. It's a proper slap. It's a proper noun. A specific noun.

Anyway, next. And for my Russian friends who hate when I joke, it's fun for me to do this,

and it makes it fun for other students. Learning should be a fun experience, right? You still

can learn and have fun. Next. Nouns made up of two words. Now, I'm going to talk a little

bit to give you some time, but also clarify. I was explaining to you that over time we

have nouns, two words joined together with a hyphen, right, to better explain what it

is we're looking at, right? Then I said to you over time, and I don't mean in a week

or two. Some of you are like, "So I have dry cleaning today, and in three days it becomes

just dry cleaning. Is this what happens? Yeah, this is crazy." No. I'm talking 50, 100, 200

years, okay? We have to use it a lot. But the new word that's created, this is a compound

noun. As you can see, it still says "book", and it still says "store". It's just together

because we use it so often we don't bother hyphenating and wasting time. That takes time.

So, a hyphenated word is a compound word, and if you see a word like this, it is also

a compound noun. Okay, just making sure you get that. All right, so... Oh, damn it. Oh,

no. I told you. If you were listening carefully, I told you the answer. I didn't want to. I

didn't. Really, I didn't. It was that proper slap, see? I got a proper slap, knocked me

out about, all right? So I lost it. It's a compound noun, all right?

And finally, nouns that you can count. Nouns you can count on. Yeah, you like that? Nouns

you can count on. When you can count on something, you can trust or rely. So if you say, "I can

count on my brother", I can. Nicky's a good guy. It means I can trust and rely on him.

If you can count on, I don't know, your boss, maybe, then they'll pay you for sure, okay?

Nouns you can count. What are those? Those are the easiest ones. Yeah. Almost everybody

knows these ones. Countable. They're countable nouns. Your apples, your houses, and everything

else. Cool? Great. If you got that, you did really, really, really well. Still got to

go do the quiz at engVid, though. I'm not letting you off the hook. Speaking of hooks,

I got fishes up here. I'm just a funny guy. Let's start with a bonus. Pants and glasses.

Do you remember I told you that when we go from a singular to a plural noun, we add an

S, and that's how we can tell the difference? And I told you about the irregular nouns,

yada, yada, yada. And then there's this. Boom. And now you're going to say, "Well, this must

be multiple pants", right? To multiple glasses. No. Something I used to say to my students

all the time. So, you have to listen to the whole thing I say. I would tell them, "English

is a very stupid language." Now, the people who weren't really students would laugh, and

laugh, and laugh, and just kept laughing. "This teacher is so stupid." Then they wouldn't

let me finish. I'd go, "You have to say everything." Right? Meaning that in our language, we like

a lot of exposition. We like to say a lot to explain it. And in this case, I gave you

an example, add an S, but now I got to say the rest of it. That's not always the case.

When you look at words like "pants" and "glasses", it's very specific. For instance, example,

"Pants used to be like this." This would be one pant leg, but you can't walk around unless

you want to get arrested with one pant leg on, so you have to add another one. So, this

becomes "pants" because this and this, but it's one pair. It's only one item. And "glasses".

If you have bad eyes and two eyes, you can't... Well, they used to wear one called a "monocle",

but generally you have one and two to correct both eyes, and then they're called "glasses",

because it's actually describing what it is. It's two things joined as one. This is a singular

item, even though it says "pants", even though it says "glasses". If someone said, "I left

my glasses at home", they do not have 20 pieces of little glasses they pick up and carry with

them wherever they go. They're talking about the things they put on their eyes because

they're two of them that have to be together as a unit. The same thing goes with "pants".

And "shorts". Wow, in the summertime when it gets hot and people start wearing shorts

and they've got those nice legs and they're walking in their shorts. Yeah, anyway. "Shorts"

because it's two legs and the pants, they're short pants. Yeah. Anyway, so these are singular

items. Don't get confused by that, okay?

"Fish". "Fish" is interesting because last night I had fish for dinner, and in Lake Ontario

there are many fish. And you're going, "Teacher, you're a bad teacher. You don't know difference.

Difference is fish, yeah?" No. "Fish" is both singular and plural form. "Teacher, you're

not smart. You put fishes in red, too." Here's one for you, and I'm going to give you an

extra bonus one because that's the type of guy I am and that's the way the day is going.

"People" is plural, but it's singular. However, you can also have "peoples". Why, I say. Aha.

Well, "people" is a collective noun, but on the planet Earth there are many peoples. That

means groups of people. And to tell you that, we have to add the "s" that it's not just

one group, but I'm talking about many groups of peoples. The peoples of the Earth. They're

not talking about Canadians, or the French, or Zimbabweans. Singularly, they're talking

about all of these groups. They are not the same, and we have to identify them. They are

different groups of people, and they are the peoples of the world.

The same happens with fishes. Okay. There's haddock. You're going to know why I was born

in English. There's haddock. There's cod. I don't know those other funky fishes. I just

like me fish and chips, eh? Okay? So, there are different types of fishes, and when we

talk about the fishes of the world, it's similar to the peoples of the world. There are different

types of fishes. So, fishes... Like, one group of fish are called "fish". There are many

fish, like salmon. Fish. Right? But if you want to talk about salmon, haddock, cod, battered

in beer, deep fried for five minutes, delicious. Then there are fishes, because we're talking

about the different types of groups. Cool? So, that's a confusing one for even... I would

say, yeah, even peoples. I've heard natives go, "You can't say peoples." I'm like, "You

can." But it's very, very specific situations. The same works with fishes. And there's your

bonus. Okay? Cool.

Oh, yes. It is homework time. You know, because this is like a full class here, we give you

the lesson, we give you extra stuff to take away and chew on and digest and learn. Then

we have to give you homework, like everyone should get homework today. And today's homework

will be worth 100 points each. You get 100 points for every student who sees your homework

and gives a thumbs up if it's on, I think, YouTube, or if it's on the engVid website

and you get a thumbs up or a check mark, whatever. It's worth 100 points. You can give yourself

a pat on the back, because you are smart. All right?

First question you have to answer is, "Please give me..." Now, hmm, I have some an assault.

You have to figure out what kind of noun it is, then you'll know how to answer that, because

these are determiners and they're going to tell you how to use it. Right? Assault, you

have to figure out what kind of noun it is, then you'll know which determiner, because

"a" means one and "some" means, you know, a grouping, not necessarily counted. Oh, good

luck with that one.

And how about this one here? There's James with a small "j" and James with a capital

"j", and Mr. E with a small "e" and Mr. E with a big "e", they're friends. Which one

should you use? Now, you've got to figure out what kind of noun it is, then you'll know

if you should use a capital or not a capital. Right? Anyway, you're the experts now, I've

taught you all I can, so grasshopper, it is up to you.

Before we go, I want to say this one. Please don't forget to press "like" if you like the

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www.vidasinvideo.com, where there is a bigger quiz and other lessons on grammar for nouns,

commas, and what have you. Right? Anyway, it's been a pleasure. I'm James, that's my

proper noun, with a capital. I'll help you on your quiz. Anyway, have a good one, I'll

see you soon.