Basic English Grammar Made Easy

- Do you think grammar is just a lot of boring rules?

Well, think again, my friend.

Think differently, because learning English grammar

can be easy and fun if you think about it correctly.

Let me help you change your thinking.

(upbeat music)

Hi, nice to see you again.

Oh, and if you're new, my name's Keith.

I run the website, The Keith Speaking Academy

and the YouTube channel, English Speaking Success.

So listen, in this fun lesson,

I'm going to make grammar easy for you.

I'm going to do this first with a short story, an anecdote,

and then we'll do a review of

the most important parts of speech,

including verbs, nouns, prepositions,

adjectives, and many, many more.

In the end, there's a little quiz

to help you review and have a bit of fun.

And also, don't forget to click the link below

and you can download that PDF of this lesson.

Finally, if you want to practise your spoken grammar

with a native English speaker, then check out Cambly.

This is a fantastic platform where you can find

native English speaking teachers

and improve your speaking skills.

The great thing is the teachers

come from lots of backgrounds.

So you have IELTS and TOEFL trainers,

you also have teachers who have a background in business,

filmmaking, music, even journalism.

So you can find somebody to match your needs.

More about that later, let's get into it

and start making grammar easy.

I think language is like music.

(soft music)

You listen to music and you hear beautiful sounds.

You listen to a language and I hear beautiful sounds.

With music, you have different names

for the notes and the order they go in.

With language, you have different names

for the words and the order they go in.

And that's it, grammar just describes the language.

It's not the actual language,

it's just a way of talking about it.

Now, maybe you started to get

nervous about grammar at school

when your teacher began to introduce some names and labels

for things like the present perfect subjunctive,

the possessive determiners, the predicate,

and then suddenly lots of rules, and then exceptions,

and then at the end of the day,

you felt that grammar was the same as headache.

And that's very, very common.

You see, I think we need to change things.

I think we should start by listening to the language,

loving it, and then repeating it.

Not starting with the grammar, talking about it.

So we're learning English.

I suggest you listen, you love it, and then you repeat it.

And let me tell you a little anecdote, right?

This is when I was younger.

I was a teenager and I began learning to play the piano.

I did it on my own.

I had a little keyboard, something,

probably something like this.

Yep.

Of course, those days we didn't have apps,

but we had something similar.

And so I was at home, and I was playing.

(soft piano music)

And I was, you know, practising , teaching myself.

And then after a few weeks,

my friend came along, and he's a musician.

He played the guitar and he said,

oh, what are you learning?

So I showed him like.

(soft piano music)

And he said, great, that's a scale in C major.

And I was like, a what?

A scale in C major?

And he said, yes.

I thought, that's interesting.

And then I played him something I'd learned.

(soft piano music)

And he said, oh, an arpeggio.

I had no idea, and then.

(soft bluesy piano music)

Oh, a blues scale in C minor.

I had no idea.

And he said, that's great.

And what he was doing, he was describing what I was playing,

but I had listened, loved it, and repeated.

What's interesting is that then I began to get curious

about the names, and the rules, and the order,

and it actually started to help me.

And I think it's the same with language, right?

What we should do is start by listening, loving, repeating,

and then get curious, find out the names,

the labels, the rules, and that can help us.

And that's exactly what I did

when I learned Spanish and when I learned Chinese.

I began with the language and doing it,

loving it, repeating it, and then bit by bit

learning the labels and the rules.

And I think that's the way to do it,

and that's the way to think about it.

So for me, grammar always comes second.

It's a kind of a way of clarifying

rather than a basis for learning.

With this in mind, I offer you

this lesson coming up now, basic grammar.

I imagine most of you are beyond beginner level,

otherwise you wouldn't really understand me.

So use this as a way of kind of

getting clear about the grammar, reviewing it,

getting curious about the rules,

and use it as something to help you move along,

not as a starting point.

Great, let's get into it.

Okay, so we're going to look at, well,

eight of the most important parts of speech, speaking,

and these include verbs, adverbs, nouns, articles,

adjectives, pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions, OMG.

Now you may be thinking that's a lot, Keith.

Yes it is, but don't worry.

You don't have to be stuck in the classroom with me.

This is YouTube, right?

You can go down to the description,

and there's a timestamp, and you can click

on the part that is most interesting

or useful for you, and just watch that.

You don't have to watch the whole video.

You can, but you don't have to.

Okay, I'm gonna begin with verbs.

So, what are the verbs?

Simply, verbs are doing words.

They describe actions that we do, right?

Like drive.

Spanish roundabout, always fun and games.

Cook.

Lose.

Where's my pen?

Also, they can describe states of being like be or seem.

Okay, the most important thing about verbs

is they tend to describe actions

in the present, in the past,

and in the future, different tenses.

So in the present, we can say I'm cooking a soup.

Or we can talk about a present habit, for example,

and say, I usually cook on Sundays.

And one of the most important things to remember,

because we don't really conjugate verbs in English,

it's I cook, you cook, they cook, we cook, we all cook.

However, he, she, and it cooks.

You must add an S when you're talking about another person,

he, or she, or a thing, it, the dog.

So add the S.

Now you're saying, of course, I know that Keith,

but when you're speaking, lots of students

at a high level forget the S.

Yes, he cook a lot.

No, he cooks a lot.

So you need to practise a lot speaking out the S.

And the thing is, there are three different pronunciations.

There's /Z/, /S/, /IZ/

depending on the word, right?

She drives.

He cooks.

He loses.

So be careful about the pronunciation,

especially when speaking.

Especially when speaking?

Only when speaking.

Now, when we talk about the past, verbs can be regular,

which means they're all the same,

or irregular means they're a bit different, right?

Now, the regular past, you just add E-D.

But again, when you're speaking,

that can be three different sounds.

It can be /d/, /t/, /Id/ depending on the verb.

So you may have, for example, I cooked yesterday.

I washed my face.

I wanted to go to the cinema.

So be careful on the pronunciation.

If it's not regular, then it's irregular,

and they're all different, and you just have to learn them.

There are about 200 irregular verbs in English,

and in my free PDF you can see

the most important ones for you

at a beginner-intermediate level.

An example might be drive.

I drove yesterday.

A final interesting thing about verbs

is that they can become a noun very easily

if you add I-N-G, right?

Cook, cooking, cooking becomes a noun.

I like cooking, or cooking is fun.

Driving is dangerous.

It becomes a noun.

Great, that's it let's move on

Next up, adverbs.

Now, adverbs tell you how you do something, right?

So if you drive, how do you drive?

I drive quickly, I drive safely.

They tell me how I do something.

So they describe the verb.

Normally they're easy to make, right?

You would take an adjective

like quick, and you add L-Y, quickly.

Or safe, safely.

And normally, usually, the adverb comes after the verb.

I drive quickly, I drive safely.

If there is a thing, I read books,

then the adverb will come after the thing,

or after the object.

I read books slowly.

Now, in a similar way to verbs,

adverbs can also be regular or irregular.

99% of them are regular.

Whew, great, but there are a handful,

maybe five or six, which are irregular.

So instead of taking the adjective and adding L-Y,

you have a different word.

Most common one is good.

Well, so we don't say I cook goodly.

No, I cook well.

And the others are quite easy,

'cause a lot of them are the same

as the adjective and the adverb,

like fast, fast, hard, hard, late, late, right?

I drive fast, I play hard, I arrived late.

So these are quite easy to remember.

In addition to talking about how you do something,

we can talk about the time,

when you do it, and how often you do it.

And we use adverbs for this, right?

For example, I drive carefully, we said.

I always drive carefully.

Always tells us how often I do it.

And that adverb normally goes in between

the subject and the verb, the person and the doing word.

I always drive carefully.

I always drive my car.

I don't let any Tom, Dick, or Harry drive my car.

The most common adverbs hear of frequency

are sometimes, always rarely, hardly ever, never.

Others are things like now and again,

from time to time, once in a blue moon, meaning very rarely.

When you have more than one word,

it's usually called an adverbial,

and this can go either at the beginning

or at the end of the sentence.

So you may say, well, once in a blue moon,

I drive my wife's car,

or I drive my wife's car once in a blue moon,

at the beginning or at the end.

A final note is that adverbs actually

can also describe adjectives.

Ho, yes, how interesting!

More about that later.

Let's move on now to talk about nouns.

Right, next, nouns.

So nouns are things like piano,

pen,

book,

book,

or people

like friend, teacher, colleague,

or places like classroom, city, kitchen.

Notice if you take things like friend or city

and you actually use the name like Jack and Manchester,

it's still a noun, but we call that a proper noun.

I don't know why a proper noun.

And if you're writing it, it has a capital letter,

but not when you're speaking it, obviously.

Now the thing about nouns, right,

is that you can either have one or more than one,

singular, one, or plural, more than one,

three, four, two, three, four, five, six, and so on.

When you make a noun into a plural then,

you know this, right?

You add an S or an E-S, but be careful when speaking,

because to make a noun into a plural when speaking

you either add, well, there are three sounds, right?

There's /S/, /Z/, /IZ/.

For example, books, cars, boxes.

So depending on the last sound of the noun,

it will tell you which sounds to make at the end.

Another important thing about nouns

is that you can count them.

A pen, two pens, three pens.

So you can count nouns.

However, you can't count all nouns.

Some of them are uncountable.

Things like liquids or powders.

For example, water, you can't count water.

Or coffee, you can't count coffee grammatically.

So what we can do is we can use

a trick to count, right?

We can say a glass of water

or a cup of coffee.

Rice, you can't count rice grammatically,

but you can say a grain of rice or a bowl of rice.

So these are the tricks we use to make them countable.

The most, or some of the most common uncountable nouns

that are probably countable in your language,

so can be confusing, things like furniture,

information, news, advice, they're uncountable,

so you cannot make a plural.

You can't say furnitures, no,

you have to say furniture.

You can say five pieces of furniture, right?

If you want to make it countable.

Likewise, pieces of advice, some pieces of news,

pieces of information if you want to make them countable.

The final thing to mention about nouns

is that they're not only single words.

They can also be several words,

and that we would call a noun phrase.

Logical, right, noun phrase.

Noun phrases, it's interesting to be aware of this

because when you're listening,

it will help you mark the boundaries

between the noun phrase, the verb,

adjective, and other parts of speech.

So for example, if I say the pen in my hand is black,

the pen in my hand, that's the noun phrase, is, verb, black.

So it's a longer phrase.

It's useful, 'cause when you're listening,

you wanna be listening for the verb and then go back.

For example, the woman with blonde hair

and glasses is from London.

Is from London, that's the verb, is,

everything before then is a noun phrase.

The woman with blonde hair and glasses,

that's the noun phrase.

So as you're listening,

it can really help your listening comprehension

to be aware that the noun is not just one word.

It can be a phrase.

Okay, let's move on.

Next up, I'm gonna talk about articles,

and three kinds of articles we'll talk about.

The first one is a or an, and you'll notice, hopefully,

when I talked about nouns, I said pen, book,

but of course we usually say a pen,

a blue pen, a black pen, a book.

If a noun begins with a vowel sound

like elephant or apple, then we say an.

And when you're speaking, link,

an elephant, an apple.

And people go napple, what's napple?

No, an apple, 'cause you're linking, an elephant.

Do notice with plurals like dogs,

we don't use a, right?

I love dogs.

I like cats.

Also with uncountable nouns, we don't use a or an.

I need information.

Okay, the second kind is the,

and this is when we basically

are referring to a specific noun,

and it's where you know which one, I mean, right?

Can you pass me the blue pen?

We can see the blue pen.

We both know which one I mean, that's when we use the.

The third kind is what is called demonstratives articles

because they kind of demonstrate

where the thing is, this and that.

So for example, this pen is blue, that pen is black.

This is close, that is far.

Some students asked me what's the distance

when it goes from this to that?

One metre, two metres?

It's not about distance, it's about feeling, right?

If you say that, you're creating the feeling of distance.

So it's all relative, and it's not only physical distance.

It can be time distance, right?

This story I'm gonna tell you

is very interesting, this story, now.

That story you told me yesterday

was interesting, that story.

In the past, right?

Okay, so it's also a time distance.

Singular, this, plural, these.

You have to smile a lot, these.

Singular, that, plural, those.

Oh, those.

Great, let's move on

Next up, adjectives.

So adjectives can describe nouns, right?

For example, we had a book, an interesting book.

Notice the a from book becomes an

because of the adjective beginning with a vowel sound.

An interesting book.

Actually, it's an exciting book.

A delicious chocolate.

A refreshing drink.

Mmm.

It's the great thing about YouTube teaching.

You can stuff yourself with chocolates in the classroom.

And notice the adjective comes before the noun.

A refreshing drink, a refreshing drink.

When learning adjectives I think it's also a very good idea

to learn the antonyms at the same time.

So an antonym is a word with the opposite meaning.

For example, big, small.

When you learn big, learn small.

When you learn thick, a thick book, a thin book.

Learn the antonyms, great.

And we can also use adverbs to describe adjectives.

Adverbs like really, absolutely, totally, completely.

For example, this is an exciting book.

This is a really exciting book,

or that was an absolutely delicious chocolate.

Great, let's move on.

So thank you for watching so far.

I thought we should have a break,

maybe have a refreshing drink

because you've been seeing so much new grammar.

Now then, knowing grammar is one thing,

but what happens when you speak?

Sometimes you forget, you make mistakes,

and that is absolutely normal.

It's fine, it's part of the learning process, right?

Now, the thing is I always suggest,

start listening, then loving, and then repeating,

and then you can start reviewing the grammar,

like in this video, and practising more.

Practising is great.

You can practise on your own.

You can also practise with somebody else.

And if you can get feedback on your speaking, even better.

A great place to do that, I think, is Cambly.

Cambly is an online platform where you can find

native English speaking teachers

who can help you with your English.

It's great, right?

You can choose the teacher

that you want to match your needs.

You can decide on the time,

and you can find Cambly tutors 24/7, around the clock.

You choose the content of your class,

and you can also watch the recording so you can review.

There are lots of packages available.

You can find one to suit you,

and because Cambly are sponsoring this video,

thank you, Cambly, then there are discounts for you.

First of all, if you're a first time user,

you can get a 50 minute free lesson,

which is great, to find out if Cambly is right for you.

And then if you get a 12 month plan,

you can get a 40% discount.

12 months is great 'cause it's a long-term investment

in your English and improving your English language.

That's it, Cambly,

you can check out the link below, below the video.

It will take you to the website.

Find out if it's right for you

and then start practising with Cambly.

Great, we're gonna go back now

to the refreshing drink and a bit more grammar.

Next, let's talk about pronouns.

As you can probably guess, they replace nouns.

Remember, people, places, things,

and also they replace noun phrases.

Do you remember the woman with blonde hair and glasses?

The noun phrase.

We use them really to avoid repetition, right?

Because you could say your car is lovely.

She likes your car, but it's a bit repetitious.

It would be better to say your car is lovely.

She likes it.

There are different kinds of pronouns.

First of all, subject pronouns

where the pronoun replaces the noun that is a subject.

For example, Jack is a subject.

Jack ate the chocolate.

The pronoun would be he ate the chocolate.

The other pronouns, I ate the chocolate.

It was mine.

You ate the chocolate.

He, she, it ate the chocolate,

or we ate the chocolate.

You plural ate the chocolate, all of you.

Or they ate the chocolate.

Secondly, we've got object pronouns,

and this is where the pronoun

replaces a noun that is an object.

For example, she likes Keith.

Keith is the object of her liking.

She likes Keith, pronoun for Keith

is she likes him, or she likes me.

The other pronouns, she likes you.

She likes him.

She likes her.

She likes it.

She likes us.

She likes you, all of you.

She likes them.

Object pronouns.

Thirdly, we've got possessive pronouns,

and this is where the pronoun is a possession.

For example, my hat, right?

My, we can replace, or my hat,

we replace with it's mine.

Your hat, it's yours.

His hat, it's his.

Her hat, it's hers.

Our hat, it's ours.

Their hat, it's theirs.

Notice of course, with it's mine,

there is no noun because you're replacing

the noun with the possessive pronoun.

Great, let's move on.

Next we're gonna talk about prepositions, my oh my.

Now, prepositions are challenging

because often they don't

translate the same into your language

and we use them differently.

So if you translate word for word,

you're probably gonna make

lots of mistakes with prepositions.

Much more useful is to try and get

the feeling of the preposition

and what native speakers feel it represents or it means.

I'm gonna try and do that

with you today with three prepositions.

I'm not gonna give you a big list of prepositions

and a list of all the different uses.

That would be a waste of time.

You wouldn't use it, you wouldn't follow it.

It wouldn't help you.

Let's just try and zone in on three prepositions

and give you a little bit of a feeling of how we use them.

I've chosen at, on, in, because I think these are

three of the most important and most challenging ones,

and also they are quite closely connected.

So let's have a go, wish me luck.

I wish you luck.

At is used, the feeling of a specific point,

a specific place or time, right?

I live at 221 Baker Street.

Really?

It's a specific point, right?

A specific house.

I get up at six o'clock in the morning, a specific time.

Also, at has the idea, if you like, of a space, or a bubble.

If you imagine, for example, I'm at home,

the idea of a feeling of a bubble or a space,

that you're in that bubble, so at home,

you don't know if I'm in the kitchen,

in the bathroom, in the study, in the lounge,

but I'm in that bubble, right?

I'm at home.

Likewise at work, but you don't know exactly

if I'm at my desk, in the toilet, in the office.

At the beach, right?

Am I on the sand, in the water,

in the coffee bar, at the beach.

At the cinema, at the shops.

Idea of a bubble, right?

Next, on, on can represent more,

well kind of touching a surface

or a platform, generally speaking.

Talking about places, right?

On the table, the cup is on the table.

It's a surface.

On the wall, there's a picture on the wall.

On Baker Street, I live on Baker Street.

You're on the surface of the street.

Platforms, well, I'm on the internet,

I'm on the phone, I'm on Facebook.

They're all kinds of platforms that you're on.

Time, on Monday, days of the week, on Monday, on Tuesday,

on the 5th of January, which is also a day.

So again, it's the idea of being on,

on a kind of a platform.

If you think of all the days of the month as a platform,

you're on one day, I'm on Monday.

I'm not on Monday, I work on Monday.

I don't work on Sunday.

Next, in, in has the idea of being

contained in a container like in a box.

Clear, right?

In Manchester, think of the city

as a container you're inside, I'm in Manchester,

I'm in the car, get in the car.

Okay, with time in July, in August.

So think of the month, there's a number of days,

and you're contained in that.

So in July could be one day in the month.

In summer, idea of contained in the season.

And also in 2021, right?

The idea of being in the year.

There are many different parts of the year

or months of the year.

So at, on, in, there is a connection between them,

and I'd like to show it like this.

At being very specific, on being bigger,

and in being even bigger.

Let me show you some examples, right?

At six o'clock, very specific.

On Monday, bigger.

In July, bigger.

He lives at 221 Baker Street, at very specific.

He lives on Baker Street, bigger.

He lives in London, even bigger.

At, on, in, think of it like that.

I hope this helps you get

a bit of a feeling for the different prepositions.

I should do a whole video

about prepositions and the feelings.

Let me work on that.

For now, let's move on.

Last but not least, conjunctions.

Conjunctions are words like, and, or, but, so, because,

and these are words we use to join

other words, phrases, and even clauses.

They're very, very useful, and they actually,

as you use them, they help you build up longer sentences,

which helps build your fluency.

For example, right?

We could say he eats a lot.

He is fat.

Two sentences, two clauses.

We can use a conjunction,

different ones to connect them, right?

He eats a lot so he is fat.

He eats a lot because he is fat.

He eats a lot and he is fat.

You see, there are different possibilities.

The good thing to know as a beginner

is that in spoken English,

we mostly use very simple conjunctions.

There are more complex ones you can learn as you go on,

but if you can master using the basic simple ones,

these are what we normally use when we're speaking.

But as I said, practise building up

your sentences using conjunctions,

and that really gives you more complex sentences.

If you're studying for IELTS,

you'll know complex grammar is very important.

This is a great first step to mastering

just joining your clauses together over a longer sentence.

Excellent, that's it.

Let's see how well you have learned.

We're gonna move on to a little quiz.

Right, in this quiz we've got five quick fire questions.

You need to say if the phrase

is grammatically correct or incorrect,

and then think about why.

If you like, you can put your answers in the comments below.

Let's do question number one.

I think cook is fun.

(clock ticking)

It's incorrect, right?

Because cook is a verb,

but here it's the subject of the sentence,

it must be a noun.

I think cooking is fun.

Question number two, I read slowly books.

(clock ticking)

It's incorrect, right?

It should be I read books slowly.

The adverb comes after the verb,

but if there's an object,

a direct object, books,

then the adverb comes after the object.

I read books slowly.

Number three, I bought three furnitures.

(clock ticking)

It's incorrect again, because furnitures

is an uncountable noun.

You cannot count it or them.

You must say I bought three pieces of furniture.

Number four, I love cats.

(clock ticking)

Yes, it's correct, well done.

Cats as a plural does not take a, or an, or the.

I love cats.

Final question, number five.

The hat is mine hat.

(clock ticking)

Right, it's incorrect.

Okay, it should be that hat is mine

because mine is the possessive pronoun replacing hat.

So you don't need to say hat again.

Right, great, well done.

How did you do?

How many did you get correct?

Tell me in the comments down below,

and also tell me about any other grammar

that you find difficult or challenging

and I can make a video about that in the future.

So listen, if you've enjoyed this video,

please do subscribe and turn on the notifications.

I hope this has made grammar a little bit easier for you,

especially the basic grammar

to give you a basic understanding.

Remember my philosophy, listen to English,

love it, repeat it, and then practise as well.

And of course, if you want to practise,

go and check out Cambly

where you can practise with native English speakers,

choosing the teacher of your choice.

If you want to try it,

you can do a 50 minute class for free,

and then you can, if you choose a 12 month package,

you can get a 40% discount.

Just use the code newkeith when you sign up.

That's it, great.

Most of all, have fun when you're studying,

and learning, and growing into

a more confident English speaker.

And I look forward to seeing you

very, very soon in the next video.

Take care, my friend, bye bye.

(upbeat music)