How to Correctly Use Numerical Adjectives

5,766 views ・ 2014-02-07

RealLife English


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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Hey! What's going on guys?
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Welcome to another episode of Real Life TV. I'm Chad, and today I'm going to teach you
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all about how to use nouns as numerical adjectives. Aww yeah!
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Is this Real Life?
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Ok, so, one thing you guys must already know and have to remember very quickly is that
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in English, when we use adjectives, it always comes before the noun. For example: a white
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cat; a black dog; a red car.
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But, in English, we often use numbers to describe that noun, and that's what we call a numerical
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adjective. For example, have you ever stayed at a five-star hotel? A five-star hotel? If
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it's five, why do we say "star", and not "stars"?
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That is because in English we have a rule, where when you use a number as an adjective,
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you never put the number in the plural, the noun of that number.
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So, in this case, I said five-star, I never say "stars", five-star hotel. Five-star hotel.
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So, some other examples of this are, any, think of anything that you can count. So,
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for example, a day, a twelve-hour day. "Day" is the noun and I'm using "twelve-hour" to
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describe the noun "day". So, have you ever worked a twelve-hour day? Not twelve hours,
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twelve-hour day.
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So I'm going to go through some examples right now. I'm going to give you a complete sentence
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and I want you to try to rephrase this so you're using the numerical adjectives.
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For example: think of a job which's salary is twenty thousand dollars. What would you
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call that? That's right, if you said a twenty thousand-dollar salary, you'd be correct.
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Let me give you another one. A meeting which lasts for two hours. What would you call that?
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A two-hour meeting. Today I had a two-hour meeting.
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Let's think of a soccer team. A soccer team has five players. So, you can say it is a
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five-player team.
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Ok, another one. A family that has three children. What would you call that? That is a three-child
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family. Not the plural, which is "children", we use the singular, which is child. A three-child
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family.
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Let's think about the month of February. February has 28 days. So, I could say that February
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is a 28-day month. It's a 28-day month.
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Ok, so, hopefully with all these exemples that I've just given you, you can understand
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how numerical adjectives work, and can also see how common, and how easy they are to use
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in English. All you have to do is just remember that, when we use numbers as an adjective,
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a numerical adjective, remember the noun never has plural, it's never in the plural form.
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Thank's a lot for joining me here today, in this episode of Real Life TV. I hope you guys
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enjoyed it. And, don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel, where you can get
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many many more awesome videos like this, and don't forget to go to our website, there's
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a link in the box below, that will take you back to the post on the website, where you
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can see everything that I'm saying on the transcript.
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Ok guys, thanks a lot, and I hope to see you next time on the next episode of Real Life
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TV.
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