English language words

Parts of speech

Nouns       e.g. chair, information, happiness

Verbs       e.g. choose, tell, and complain

Adjectives     e.g. happy, tall, dangerous

Adverbs       e.g. slowly, carefully, often

 Prepositions     e.g. in, at, on

 Pronouns       e.g. me, you, him, we, it, she

Articles      e.g. definite article (the); indefinite article (a/an)  

Special! Terms

Uncountable noun: (U) a noun which has no plural form and cannot be used with the indefinite article, e.g. information.

Plural noun: (p1) a noun which only has a plural form and cannot be used with the indefinite article, e.g. trousers.

Infinitive: the base form of a verb, e.g. (to) work, (to) stop, (to) be.

Phrasal verb: a verb + adverb and/or preposition, e.g. turn on (verb + adverb), look after (verb + preposition), give up (verb + adverb), and put up with (verb + adverb + Preposition)

Idiom: a group of words with a meaning that is different from the individual words, e.g. never mind, hang on, a short cut, keep an eye on something.

Transitive verb: a verb which needs a direct object, e.g. Police caught the man (‘the man’ the direct object of the verb ‘caught’).

Intransitive verb: a verb which does not need a direct object, e.g. the books arrived on time. (There is no direct object after arrive.)

Word building 

In the word uncomfortable, un- is a prefix, comfort is a root, and -able is a suffix. Other common prefixes include: re-, in-, and dis-; common suffixes include: -ity, -ment, and -ivt Many words also have synonyms, which are words with the same meaning. For example; ‘big’ is a synonym of ‘large’. The opposite is small’.  

Pronunciation

Dictionaries show the Pronunciation of a word using phonetic symbols. Each word contains one or more syllables: ‘book’ has one syllable; ‘before’ has two syllable (be-fore); ‘cinema’ has three syllables (ci-ne-ma); ‘education’ has four syllables (e-du-ca. tion); and so on. 

For pronunciation, it is important to know which syllable has the main stress. On ‘before’ is the second syllable (be ‘fore) on ‘cinema’ it is the first (‘cinema); and on ‘education’ it is third (edu’cation). 

Note: Dictionaries mark stress in different ways: in bold (return); or a ‘before the main syllable (re’turn). Make sure you understand how your dictionary shows it.

Punctuation

Full stop.          Comma,           brackets ( )       hyphen -          question mark ?