Confused Words - Succeed, Success, Successful, Successfully

Hi, my name is Rebecca from engVid, and in today's lesson, we're going to talk about

one of the words which I have found is really confusing to a lot of students.

I would say in the many years that I've been teaching English, this is probably the word

which most students make a mistake with, either in terms of the way they use it grammatically

or with the spelling.

So let's pay special attention to this word, and the word itself is the word "success"

and all forms of that word, okay?

And one of the keys to mastering English, in fact, is to learn how to use different

forms of the same word.

That means you must learn how to use the noun, the verb, the adjective, and the adverb correctly.

If you're not sure what those terms mean, it would be helpful to learn what they are

in your own language first so that you know what we're talking about in English when we

say a noun or a verb or an adjective or an adverb, and then it would be easier for you

to apply it when you're studying English, okay?

So let's look at these words.

The first word is the word "success".

What form of speech is that?

That's the noun, okay?

Success.

Now, let me tell you how I, as a young person, learned the spelling, the correct spelling

of this word.

When I was in high school, the cheerleaders in the United States where I was at that time

used to have something where they said, "S-U-C-C-E-S-S.

That's the way we spell success.

S-U-C-C-E-S-S.

That's the way we spell success," okay?

So I don't know if that will help you.

It might help you if you're in an exam and you're not sure how to write that word.

Perhaps you can say that to yourself and you'll remember.

And that's how we remember to use two Cs and two Ss, right?

S-U-C-C-E-S-S.

That's the way we spell success, all right?

Two Cs, two Ss.

The next word is the verb, right?

"Succeed", S-U-C-C-E-E-D, right?

And the next word is the adjective, "successful", right, "successful", S-U-C-C-E-S-S, again.

And then "full".

Of course, when we make it an adjective with words that use "full", when we say "successful",

it means "full of success", but we have only one L.

So many students also make a mistake here, they add an L or they leave out some of the

Cs or the Ss.

Be really careful of the spelling of this word, right, "successful".

And the last one is the adverb, which is "successfully", all right?

Let's use them now in a sentence so you understand exactly how to use them, which is more important

than even knowing exactly which part of speech they are.

First one, where it's used as a noun, is "She is a success", right?

She is a success.

So we see it's a noun, and we're using the word "a" before that, "a success".

Next we're using it as a verb, "She succeeded in business", right?

She succeeded in business, we're using the past tense of that, so we add in the -ed,

the regular verb.

Third one, "She is a successful business person", right?

She is a successful business person.

Successful is describing the word "business person".

What kind of business person?

A successful business person, right?

And the last one is where we're using it as an adverb.

She runs her business successfully, right?

Successfully describes how she runs her business.

She runs it successfully, all right?

So I hope that now you have a little bit of a better idea how to use the different forms

of this important word.

The word "success", of course, I'm sure you know the meaning of it.

It means to achieve your goal, to not fail at something, right?

And I wish you a lot of success with this.

If you'd like to practice a little bit more how to use the different forms of this word,

please go to our website, www.engvid.com.

You'll see a quiz on this and on many other topics in English, all right?

Good luck with your English.

Bye for now.