The Right English Adjective Order | Grammar Focus

Why does it sound perfectly natural for me to say a sentence such as

one of my students recently gave a fantastic one-hour mindset-focused

discussion, and yet if I make one little change to that sentence,

suddenly it sounds a little off? For example,

one of my students recently gave a mindset-focused one-hour,

fantastic discussion.

I'm using all the same words in both of those sentences and, yet again,

changing the word order just a little bit makes that second sentence sound

somewhat strange. Why is that? Take a look at those three adjectives.

Fantastic. One-hour. Mindset-focused.

There is a specific order English speakers follow.

When we use more than one adjective to describe a noun in a sentence,

we call it the Royal Order of Adjectives or the Universal Rule of Adjectives.

That all sounds very proper and important and it is important

when you follow this specific order,

it allows your sentences to flow more smoothly.

In this Confident English lesson today,

you're going to learn exactly what this order is, how to use it,

and how to practice it so you always get it right.

Now before we go any further, if this is your first time here, welcome.

I'm Annemarie, an English Confidence and Fluency Coach.

Everything I do is designed to help you get the confidence you want for your

life and work in English. If you'd love to get more free resources for me,

including years of my Confident English lessons,

you can get all of that and more at my Speak Confident English website.

While you're there,

you can also download a free fluency training I have called How to Get the

Confidence to Say What You Want In English. To get started,

there are three important notes I want to share with you. Number one,

in this lesson today, you will hear me use example sentences with three,

four, or even five adjectives,

and I'll do that to demonstrate how we use this order. However,

in everyday English conversation,

whether you're writing an email or talking about your favorite book,

maybe a workshop you attended recently,

I recommend that you limit the number of adjectives you might use

to no more than three.

The reason is if you start to add four or five or six adjectives,

the sentences start to feel overly complex and heavy.

So as you continue today, definitely observe the examples I have for you,

but in your communication,

limit your adjectives generally to three or fewer.

The second thing I want to share with you is I will be introducing you to

categories of adjectives. For example,

opinion-focused adjectives such as the word lovely in a lovely blouse

and size-based adjectives such as large.

If I describe a large truck,

it is these categories where we want to be careful about the order in which we

put them in a sentence. However,

because we tend to limit how many adjectives we use in a sentence to maybe

one, two, or three,

we won't see every category of adjective in every

sentence, and you'll see that when I share some examples. And finally,

does every English speaker always follow this order of adjectives perfectly?

Definitely not. There's a few reasons for that. Number one,

we all make mistakes.

So from time to time you might hear someone use a different order when it was by

accident. Sometimes it is an intended choice.

There might be a specific reason someone chose to change the word order.

And lastly,

we do have a few groups of words in English that are considered

a unit or a colocation.

It's a group of words that English speakers use together and they always use

it in that order.

Occasionally there might be a change in this adjective word order for that.

I'll share an example with you a little bit later.

I don't want you to get too worried about it.

The most important thing is to focus on the word order to practice it.

I'll tell you how to do that. And if you're ever in doubt, if you're not sure,

just follow this word order. So let's start with the big picture.

If you have a sentence with a noun, a person, place, or thing,

and you're going to describe it with an adjective,

then you're going to follow this general structure.

You're going to have your determiner, the quantity,

your opinion-focused adjectives or the adjectives that describe your

attitude towards something and your fact-based adjectives.

We're going to talk about each one of those more in-depth,

but let me give you an example sentence to highlight each one.

The three lovely Spanish women helped us find the train station.

We have our determiner, the quantity, the opinion-focused adjective,

and the fact-based adjective.

Now let's get to part one where we're going to look at the determiners and the

quantity

Determiners include your articles A and in the possessive

pronouns such as my, your, his, her,

and demonstratives such as this, that, these and those,

your determiner always comes first. For example,

your interesting marketing presentation helped us better understand our client's

needs,

or a sensational news story caught my attention this morning after your

determiner, and if it's necessary, you'll have your quantity focused word.

And of course, this tells you how much or how many, for example,

these four paint colors suited the energy we wanted to bring into our home.

Once you've got your determiner and your quantity in place,

then we can move on to the opinion and attitude-focused adjectives.

As you might guess,

these adjectives highlight what you think or how you feel about the noun that

you're describing. For example, I might walk into a room and say,

this is a lovely green color for this room,

and you might walk into the same room and think, Hmm,

I think this is a boring green color.

These adjectives allow us to describe our opinion, attitude,

and feelings. Here's another example.

The strange unfamiliar approach to motivating the team actually worked.

In this case, the adjectives,

strange and unfamiliar might demonstrate my personal opinion about the approach,

or they may demonstrate a general opinion among the team.

And now here's where it gets interesting with our fact-focused

adjectives. There are several categories,

and this area alone has its own unique structure

to follow its own order.

So we're going to go over this carefully and I'll highlight several examples,

plus tell you how to practice. First, let me give you a super simple,

clear example of a fact-based adjective.

We talked earlier about a lovely green color for a room.

Lovely,

is the opinion green is the fact we can't deny that it's a green

color. We might disagree on what shade of green, but it is green.

Let's take a quick look at these categories in the order that we would use them

in a sentence,

and then we'll practice all of this together with fact-based adjectives.

We start with size, then physical, quality, shape,

and condition. From there we go to age, color,

and pattern. And finally, origin,

material type, purpose or qualifier.

Let's take a closer look at the first seven on that list because they all have

to do with the appearance of something. Size,

of course can tell us whether something is large, small, or tiny.

Physical quality can describe whether something is hard, soft,

or rough shape, of course, is whether something is round,

rectangular, or square.

Condition can describe whether something is broken, clean or dirty.

Age highlights whether something is new, old,

or from the 15th century. Color of course is red, green,

blue,

etc. And pattern would describe if something is striped or plaid.

Let's say I have a blanket and several adjectives to use to describe it,

including large, old rectangle, blue and soft.

Here's how we would put them together in a sentence. Following that order,

I have a large, soft, rectangular old blue blanket.

I'm following that order, size, physical quality, shape,

age, and color. Let's try one more.

This time I'm gonna describe a painting with the adjectives,

small and 18th century.

I have a small 18th century painting.

Before we move on with our category list, let's do a quick check-in.

I've got two sentences here, and I want you to determine which one is correct,

which one is using the adjectives in the right order sentence A,

the sweet little young auburn colored puppy slept under the chair

and sentence B,

the little sweet auburn colored young puppy slept under the chair.

Hopefully you selected sentence A.

I highlighted earlier that in this lesson I'll be using examples with three,

four, and five adjectives,

and do you notice how a couple of these longer sentences with four and five

adjectives are a little uncomfortable and heavy? They're so long to say.

That's one of the reasons we tend to use one to or three

adjectives at the most, and now let's move on to origin and material.

Origin, of course, will highlight a nationality or where something is from,

and material will describe whether something is made of brass, bronze,

or wood. For example,

let's say you walk into someone's home and it's beautifully decorated,

especially with some old brass decor.

After you compliment someone, they might say this as a response.

Thank you.

I think the old Indian brass decor gives this space a grounded feeling.

We have our adjective for age old than origin Indian

and material brass, and now our final category type,

purpose and qualifier.

These are the adjectives that answer questions such as what type, what kind,

and for what purpose. For example,

if I'm describing a shirt as a button-down shirt that tells me what

type of shirt it is, or if I describe a jewelry box,

we know that the purpose of that box is for storing jewelry.

These adjectives when used always come at the end of the list.

For example,

let's say that you are looking for or shopping for a very specific mug.

You're at the store and you're describing it to the sales associate.

You might say,

I'm looking for a tall blue dishwasher safe travel mug.

Here we have our appearance adjectives, tall and blue.

Dishwasher safe describes the type and travel mug is the purpose.

Now that you have all of this in place,

I want to briefly talk about exceptions and then go on to how

you can practice this so you always get it right.

There are times when English speakers will change the order.

Occasionally, as I mentioned earlier,

it's simply a mistake or perhaps an intended choice.

There are also collocations.

Collocations are groups of words English speakers used together in a particular

order, and we always use it in that order. Otherwise,

it sounds a little bit strange to us. For example,

I might walk into a room and say, that's an ugly velvet sofa.

Not a polite thing to say, but I might say it,

and here I'm following the order of adjectives. Ugly describes my opinion.

Velvet is the material.

Now let's add on big and old.

These are fact-based age and size. Typically,

these would come after the opinion. However,

you may hear many English speakers say,

the big old ugly velvet couch, the big old ugly table,

the big old ugly truck.

This group of words is being used as an entire unit, as a collocation,

and someone might decide to use it in that way because it tends to flow more

smoothly. Now,

if you are ever in doubt and you're not sure which order to use or is it a

collocation,

it's always best to go back to this order and follow the

adjective order you've learned. Today.

I want you to imagine you're gonna describe a chair,

and I want you to think about how to use these adjectives in the correct order

to do that 15th century Spanish gorgeous

leather and lounge. Take a moment,

review that order of adjectives, and then put your sentence together.

Here's the sentence you might have.

That's a gorgeous 15th century Spanish leather

lounge chair. So what's the trick to getting this right every time?

The answer to that is easy. It's practice,

and I have two fantastic ways for you to do this.

First over at my Speak Confident English.com website,

I have a bonus worksheet you can download.

It's going to give you examples similar to the ones we've had today where you'll

have part of a sentence with a list of adjectives and you want to put those

adjectives in the correct order based on this universal rule.

That worksheet is going to help solidify this knowledge.

It's going to give you the repetitive practice.

You need to remember this structure more easily.

A word I love to use to talk about this is automaticity.

It's going to build up your automaticity in English.

Automaticity is the ability to use language automatically without thinking about

it too much or having to stress. So again, to get that worksheet,

visit this lesson at the Speak Confident English website and download it.

Here's the second thing.

My expertise is in closing the gap between learning

English and speaking English. Here's what I mean.

Have you ever learned a new vocabulary word or a grammar rule like this

universal order of adjectives and thought, oh my gosh, this is wonderful.

I can't wait to use it in English conversation.

And then when you start to speak, it's missing.

You can't find that word that you learned or that grammar rule. Why is that?

Most struggling,

intermediate and advanced English speakers who have spent years studying

English make the mistake of believing they need

more grammar knowledge or more vocabulary in order to speak

confidently and fluently in the moment. As a result,

they delay practicing speaking until that feeling of confidence

arrives.

You and I both know if someone wanted to learn how to play the piano,

you wouldn't recommend that they just buy a few piano books and

watch lessons on YouTube.

You might recommend those steps to support their learning.

In addition to practicing the piano,

the same thing is true in learning a language.

If your goal is to speak the language,

speaking with confidence and with fluency comes from speaking practice,

it's called the confidence building learning cycle. You learn something new,

then you take action or practice it. As you do that,

your ability improves. As your ability improves,

you make progress, and that progress leads to competence,

even motivation to keep going and the cycle repeats.

So after you visit this lesson at the speakconfidentenglish.com website,

after you download that worksheet and practice,

the next step is to practice what you've learned. In speaking,

find a teacher or a coach you trust and feel comfortable with.

Join a class or a speaking club like my Confident Women Community,

where we follow this confidence building learning cycle

inside my community. We learn, practice, speak,

and make progress on new topics every month.

If speaking English with clarity, confidence,

and fluency is a goal for you this year, then take that action step,

get speaking practice with that. If you enjoyed today's lesson,

I would love to know and you can tell me in a few simple ways. Number one,

you can give this lesson a thumbs up here on YouTube. Two,

you can drop a comment down below. And three,

you can also subscribe to my Speak Confident English channel on YouTube so you

never miss one of my Confident English lessons.

Thank you so much for joining me, and I look forward to seeing you next time.