Adjectives & Adverbs Review Pt. 1: Master Key Concepts in English | Complete English Course

Hello and welcome to the next lesson. Today we're going to finally get into adjectives and adverbs. So here's your quick review. We're going to talk about what everyone should know about adjectives at your level at B2 English ready to just jump into C1. We're also going to take an adjective quiz. We're going to look at what B2 students should know about adverbs and then we'll test that as well. We'll do a B2 adverb quiz. So let's get into your definitions just to refresh your mind in case it's been a while. Adjectives modify nouns and pronouns whereas adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. So between the two, adverbs are by far more flexible. Adjectives describe nouns and pronouns but they can do more than beautiful, friendly, and competent. It's not your normal list of intermediate English words. Up until this point you have probably been memorizing lots of singular words, lots of words for just ways to enrich your speech. For example, as a beginner that's how you learn. You learn with a lot of flashcards in order to have the words and the vocabulary to be able to build the sentences and the sentence patterns you learn as a high beginner. Once you get into intermediate level, I find that a lot of students continue using this strategy. So they get to thinking like adjectives are beautiful, friendly, and competent. Well, let's see what else they can do. They can show order like the fourth chicken, the fifth kid. They can show possession, her purse. Remember, this is not going to be a pronoun. A pronoun would be hers. If it stands alone and it doesn't need a noun, then it's going to be a pronoun. But if it needs, if you just say her, you kind of need a noun to go after that to possess. Her what? Her purse. Okay, same with his. His bag. They can specify. Adjectives can specify. The man who helped. Which man? The man who helped. They can demonstrate this one. And again, don't confuse this with pronouns. There are demonstrative pronouns. This, these, that, and those. But the same words, if they have something after them, if they have a noun or pronoun after them, then they are adjectives. So this one, this cat, this dog, those oranges, those apples, those are all demonstrative adjectives, not demonstrative pronouns. If it stands alone, it's a pronoun. They can coordinate. Adjectives can coordinate things. So the bored and mischievous monkey. You can put more than one adjective together to describe one thing. And if you're just using two, most of the time you can use and. The bored and mischievous monkey, for example. However, you're also going to see times in English writing and even in our speaking where we just say bored mischievous monkey. And when we write that, we put a comma between the two. We just show that we put a comma there with a slight hesitation in our voice. Adjectives can be compound. Okay, so there's compound in the form, in the way that you use and. But then there's also compound in terms of hyphenated. The well-known author. In this case, you have an adverb and an adjective working together as one adjective unit. Well-known works together to modify author. Author, okay. So they can compare. Adjectives can compare things. So the shorter book versus the longest book. Okay, now these comparisons can be comparative in between two things or it can be between three or more things compared to a whole book. The longest book in the dictionary or the longest word in the dictionary, for example. Adjectives can be proper. For example, an American woman versus just a woman, right? You could say a woman from America or you can say an American woman. It will save you far more time in words and it will help you cut out smaller words that you don't really need if you use adjectives in this way, as opposed to saying of America or from America. You also have adjectives can, that can act like a noun. So an elderly person, the elderly need. This happens, this is, okay, this is a very weird phenomenon. I don't spend time on this later, but this is something that you're going to see. Sometimes we use these ly ending words to be, to stand on their own. So you have, it's not just ly words though, you have like an innocent child, okay? Then you have the innocent. We talk about the innocent and protecting the innocent. You have the guilty, same thing. Innocent and guilty, we will treat those as nouns, even though they are adjectives. But what happens is you could say the innocent party versus the guilty party, then you just eventually, you start to make it a little bit easier to talk about by just saying the innocent and the guilty. Typically, we do this in informal conversation where the context makes it very clear what we are talking about. We want it to be very clear what we're referring to when we say the elderly or the innocent or the guilty. But those three there though have been used so often in such conversations and even in legal conversations that, well, we've just begun saying, saying them standard across American culture. It's very standard to refer to the innocent or the elderly, the guilty. So this is something that to keep in mind as you hear news, as you look at articles, and you see, notice which adjectives that we're using like nouns. And if you don't understand why an adjective stands alone, doesn't seem to be modifying anything around it, well, you might be looking at an adjective that we have just decided as a noun in that particular context. If you're reading, the best thing to do is to go back up to the top of the article and see what they meant. What, what are they referring to as elderly, for example, if you didn't know what that meant. All right, adjectives have a natural order. You might, you, I mean, you really should know this already. All the things that I'm teaching you in this lesson, you should already know. But just in case you don't, here it is. Adjectives have a natural order that all native English speakers follow without thinking about it. I was not taught this until I investigated and I started doing research on how to teach English and how to do it well. After a while, that set off a quest for me to figure out why we order words the way we do, why we pair words in certain orders and ways that that we do. It doesn't make sense. It just seems like it comes down to tradition and that's exactly what it is. We just became set in our ways over time. So in this instance, you have determiner, opinion, the third one is size, shape, or age can kind of go back and forth as the fourth. Color, origin, material. We, we automatically categorize these in our minds without thinking about it. And honestly, if you talk to a native English speaker that has never studied adjective order, like maybe they probably just don't teach English at all on their own, they would be shocked probably to realize, you're right, I do, I do do this. So things like a determiner, let's break these down into which ones are which. A determiner is going to be an article. A and the sometimes one. Number two is going to be your opinion. So this is what you guys learned a lot of as high beginners and early intermediates. You probably learned things like wonderful, incredible, ridiculous, beautiful, amazing, gorgeous. These are your opinion. This is what you think about it. Number three is going to come down to size. Words like huge, large, massive, tiny, teeny tiny, even phrases like that. You're going to look at things that are just very large and fat or very small and skinny. Thick versus thin. These are all going to be size. Shape or age. So here you're going to see things like round, square, angled, two-year-old, a thirty-year-old. All of these are going to be the same here. Color is going to be number five. Fifth in order. Teal, neon green, violet, any color, any shade you're going to be talking about here. So if you say like shades of yellow for example. Maybe you say mustard versus gold. Those are going to be in this realm right here. The next level is going to be origin. So this could be the country from which it comes or the culture from which something comes. It could be the source. So like solar energy comes from the Sun. So we call it solar. You could be aquatic animal. Where did it come from? It is an aquatic animal so we call it that. The reason I'm not saying ocean or why I'm not saying sea is because those are not adjectives. I could use it like sea creature or ocean creature. And in older books we do that some, but it's not that common. So definitely pay attention to these. If you're going to use a pure adjective you're going to say something like solar or aquatic instead. Now the last one, the last thing that we ever mention in terms of adjective order is the material. Whether it's wooden, metal, glass, tin, whatever it's made of, that's when we start to label it. It's just at the very end. So here's what I mean if you haven't visualized it yet. I've color-coded the adjective order over here and I have an example here. There are multiple adjectives in here. Now I do not mean the order of the adjectives in the entire sentence. I just mean the order of the multiple adjectives before a noun. So in this case our noun here is moose and our noun down here is mist. So you have massive and old and glistening and morning. So I want you to decide what the order is. There's a lot of different things here going on so just cut. I would suggest that you go ahead and pause the video to look at this and decide and then I will show you the answer when you come back. Okay, are you ready? Here we go. The massive is obviously size. I have it right there. Old, moose. So old. We have size and age back to back here. So that's what these are. You cannot say the old massive moose. We will know what you mean if you say that but it might make us stop and think for a minute because depending on which adjectives you're using we're going to be confused if you get them out of order and we're not going to know why necessarily unless we've studied it before. Alright, so glistening morning mist. Glistening is difficult to label so we're gonna put it in the opinion because honestly in the morning glistening mist I would not say that at all. It would be the glistening mist which means it's going to be up here as more likely to be opinion. Now morning is going to be the origin. It's like where's the mist come from? What is it for? It's really going to be more like a time but we're not going to put that in age because that's not the age of it. It's just when it has arrived and why it is there. It is there because it is morning. Alright, here's your next one. Go Alright, here we go. A silly tiny toddler with long curly golden locks ran past me with a squeal of glee. It's a very descriptive sentence. Okay, first we have silly tiny toddler. What is this order here? What do you see? A silly. This is probably a personal opinion so we have a determiner A. We have an opinion silly. Then we have size for tiny toddler. That takes care of that noun and then we have long curly golden locks ran past me. So long for size, curly for shape like it's curls in the hair, golden for the color and then the rest of it is either an adverb or some other word form. Okay, so let's look at this one. This gorgeous antique Victorian chase has been in my family for 150 years. Go ahead and pause your video and sort this one out. Okay, here we are. Here's your answer. This gorgeous opinion antique age Victorian origin chase has been in my family for 150 years. That is an impressively old chair but so just so you know this is not something that you have to memorize necessarily. It is far better for you to practice this by listening to people. So let's go ahead and start with this. Little smart man young is going to help me today. This that was very difficult for me to say actually because it's so wrong. So I'm going to ask you to pause the video and try to fix it yourself. Go ahead. Okay, here we are. Let's see how you did. This smart little young man is going to help me today. This smart little young man is going to help me today. So this is my opinion. This is the size. This is the age and that's who this is. Next, I enjoy a nice aged white old-fashioned rocking chair on the front porch. That was still difficult for me to say. Go ahead and pause it and see if you can sort this puzzle. Here we are. We're back. Let's see how you did. I enjoy a nice old-fashioned aged white rocking chair on the front porch. Okay, here. So in this instance, we have two things, two adjectives that are opinions. Two things that are opinions. So I can say I enjoy an old-fashioned nice aged white rocking chair. I can say that and it feels okay to say that as well. However, this one is more natural because this is the shorter adjective and this is the longer adjective. So pronunciation wise, this is easier. Nice old-fashioned is a lot easier to say than old-fashioned nice. It makes me want to say and nice at the end, but part of it is that N-E-D ending makes it hard to follow with another word that says and it has an N. So N-E-D nice. It's harder to say. So the reason here, there is no logic when it comes to two things that are of the same category. If it is of the same category, you can technically put it the same. You can flip them back and forth and that is totally fine. In this case though, pronunciation rules. Whatever is easier to say is what we naturally default to. Just like water running through the land, like a river cutting through the land, it's going to go where it cuts through the easiest. Everyone around me was young, strong, excited, passionate, and dangerous. The tricky one. Go ahead and try to figure this out. All right, here we are. Let's see what we've got. Everyone around me was stupid, excited, passionate, young, and dangerous. This one is interesting for the same reason we were talking about in the last example. Stupid, excited, passionate, all of these are opinions. Young arguably could be an opinion, but also probably is not. So we're gonna put it as an age, but technically you could call this an opinion and that would be fine. You put it up here. And dangerous. Dangerous is also an opinion. We haven't proved that they are dangerous. We're just saying that they could be dangerous. The reason it's remained on the end is because of and. And dangerous. And also, something like this, the way that is worded, is building up dramatic effect, so dangerous should be the last word that it lands on. All right, so how does one learn adjective order? Because this is difficult. Practice, practice, practice. So much of English comes down to just practice. Native English speakers pick this up naturally. I know many, many students who have achieved English fluency by practicing and listening a lot. So we're not taught to arrange these words this way, but it just sounds super weird when someone doesn't use them in order. If your goal is to sound native, or to make it to A to advance, or to make it to C to advance, then you need to be practicing. This needs to be a priority to master. You also need to listen. Listen to things that have lots and lots of descriptions, like product reviews, chefs talking about recipes and the food that they're cooking, professional travelers, anybody who uses a lot of adjectives to describe what's around them. Because by doing so, you're going to get an ear for the natural order. To get an ear is an idiomatic phrase we use to understand, to begin to innately understand, to internalize what you see around you. All right, let's jump into adverbs now. These are the things, everything I'm going to tell you in this lesson about adverbs are things that you should already know. All right, so let's jump into it. Adverbs come in different categories, just like adjectives do. However, they measure different things. Remember, adverbs modify verbs and adjectives and other adverbs. So we want to be very careful with how we look at these. They usually end in LY, but not always. So let's take a look. Adverbs of manner, like quietly, superbly, crazily, these answer the question of how something was done. He is running. How is he running? He is running crazily. How is he running? He is running crazily. Adverbs of degree, very, almost, slightly. These words right here, adverbs of degree, talk about to how far or to what extent. How sad is he? He's very sad. Adverbs of place talk about where something is. So it's, your question is, where? So there is love. Where is there love? Love is everywhere. Okay, which is a really cheesy example, but you understand what I mean. We're talking about where something is, and the question is, where is it? Adverbs of time are like tomorrow, yesterday, today. So these are going to talk about things like when, obviously. So, and remember, adverbs are concerned about when something happened, or is happening, or will happen. So that's what these should be answering. The events will take place tomorrow. That would make it an adverb. But tomorrow's events, that's not an adverb. That would be tomorrow as a noun. Duration. This is how long something takes place. So briefly, soon, eventually, forever. Those are all adverbs of duration. Frequency. These are for how often something happens. So do not confuse time, duration, and frequency adverbs. So just keep in mind, time is when it happened, as if it's a fixed point in time. Duration is how long something happens for, and frequency is how often something happens. So adverbs of frequency are like sometimes, occasionally, always, never, almost, never, hardly ever. Those are all adverbs of frequency. And then adverbs of purpose are like therefore, since, hence. Adverbs of purpose are very, they're easy to confuse with other types of adverbs or transition words. So we're going to explore those as we come to them in writing. Other types of adverbs you need to know about. Remember, adverbs are the most flexible of the English parts of speech. So there's kind of a lot of them, and they do a lot. And English speakers, native English speakers, are actively making more and more types of adverbs as they go, and they're mixing things up and breaking all the rules. That's just the way we are. So conjunctive. Conjunctive adverbs are however, therefore, consequently, in conclusion. We are going to deal with a lot of these as transition phrases or terms in the writing section of this course. So we'll put a pin in that until the writing section. Focusing adverbs are like especially, just, and even. So even if I could go, I wouldn't. Or especially, particularly, specifically. These are things that you're talking about a lot of things, but especially this one. Or I just want to do this. I just want a hot dog. Or I just want some water. Interrogative adverbs. These ask when, where, why, and how. Notice that these are the questions that adverbs tend to answer. When did something happen? Where is it going to happen? Why is it happening? And how often? How is it happening? To what extent is it happening? These are interrogative. So when we ask a question about these, we are using when, where, why, and how. Relative adverbs. These are where it gets more confusing because we have relative pronouns and we have relative adjectives. Relative adverbs ask where and when. So we usually say the place when, or the time when, place where. These are relative adverbs. And we will work with these more when we get into clauses. So the placement of adverbs. This is what is most tricky because they kind of tend to be all over the place. You can place an adverb anywhere near the word it modifies. It usually precedes the adjective it modifies as well. So Tim is super intrigued. But adverbs also usually follow the verb it modifies. So when it's modifying an adjective, you usually put it before, but not always. And if you're modifying a verb, they are usually going to put it after or between verbs if there's multiple verbs. So if you're using helping verbs, for example, you're going to put it between the helping verbs and the main verb because the adverb is modifying the main verb, not the helping verbs. So seals swim quickly or the dog was angrily barking at the mailman. So it would be very odd to actually say the dog was was the dog angrily was barking at the mailman. We wouldn't say it that way. We might we might say we could say the dog was barking angrily at the man. You can say that. But when we are speaking, we generally tend to stick with the dog was angrily barking at the man because this is where we want to put the emphasis. What's more important that he was barking or that he was angrily barking? If I'm going to tell my husband that our dog was barking at the mailman, I'm probably going to stress that he was angrily barking because that's unusual. He's he's just a big bear, big teddy bear. OK, when modifying another adverb, some don't need a comma while others do. So you remember with adjectives that we tend to either put and or comma between two adjectives back to back that are modifying the same noun. Well, in this case, we won't do that. So the kids are doing surprisingly well. Both of these are adverbs and surprisingly is modifying the adverb well. So how are they doing? Surprisingly well. His words were spoken slowly and awkwardly. In this case, we have two adverbs that both end in l y. So to make it a little bit easier to pronounce, we're going to put and in there. His words were spoken slowly and awkwardly. I could say his words were spoken slowly awkwardly, but it's a little odd. I would want to put a pause in there or a slight hesitation so that I can first of all reset my mouth, pronounce awkwardly after saying slightly. But it helps a lot to have the readers understand that I'm not making a mistake. I'm just putting the two together on purpose. So his words were spoken slowly, awkwardly. Now, this is something that we do more often in writing. Not all the time, though. We when we're going to use it in writing, we're going to use it for dramatic effect, not for the sake of simplicity, because it's not simple. It is far more simple to say slowly and awkwardly. The speaker, interestingly, powerfully delivered the speech to the crowd. Did you hear how I said that? These two, both in l y, interestingly and powerfully, but I didn't use and. Instead, I used a comma to demonstrate what I was just talking about. The speaker, interestingly, powerfully delivered the speech to the crowd. You could, for the sake of dramatic effect, you could say the speaker, interestingly, even powerfully delivered the speech to the crowd. And so if I stick even in here, it makes even more sense. See what I did there? It makes even more sense if you can put interestingly, comma, even powerfully. So it puts more emphasis on what I'm doing by not putting and between the two. Now, final example on this page, the ball flew across the court swiftly, directly and beautifully. Interesting, interesting toss there. Interesting throw. The ball flew across the court swiftly, directly and beautifully. I'm going to put a comma after the first two. Now, this is the Oxford comma debate. You probably know if you were going for academics. But generally speaking, you're going to want to separate multiple adverbs side by side with of the same type side by side with commas. And it doesn't matter how you organize them. Just like adjectives of the same type, it does not matter which order they're in. So I could say, flew across the court directly, swiftly and beautifully. I could say it flew across the court beautifully, swiftly and directly. It doesn't matter. All of these are the same type of adverbs, so they're perfectly fine to use in any order that I please. However, when I'm using three, it is a bit easier to do swiftly, directly and beautifully for the sake of pronunciation. OK, you cannot, generally speaking, put three adverbs back to back. We will see later that you can for a bit if you hyphenate them, but they must be a pre-established order that we generally do hyphenate already. All right. Let's give you the quiz here. Identify the adverbs and adjectives in the following sentence and describe what they are doing. I don't want you to just pick them out. I want you to describe what they are doing. Go ahead and pause the video and do that. OK, here we are. The heavy boulder was precariously positioned upon the edge of the cliff. All right. Heavy here is going to be our adjective. We have our verb was positioned with precariously, precariously as an adverb in the middle, and it's upon the edge of a cliff. These two are prepositional phrases. We'll talk about those later in the grammar section. The adverb is describing how the boulder was positioned. OK, so the adverb here, that's why we put it in the middle of the verb. But you could also say the heavy boulder was positioned precariously upon the edge of the cliff. That is also OK. I just want you to see how we speak versus how we write. All right. The memories were overwhelmingly unbearable to face, so she discreetly hid them behind a polite smile, quietly excused herself and rigidly walked out of the room. Go ahead and pause your video. We'll see how you did. All right. Here we are. Let's see. See what's up. OK. Overwhelmingly and discreetly, quietly, rigidly, all of these are adverbs, but they're adverbs of different types. So overwhelmingly answers to what extent or how much, how unbearable was it? It was overwhelmingly unbearable. Unbearable, of course, is an adjective. So this adverb is modifying the adjective. Discreetly hid, quietly excused, rigidly walked. All of these are talking about how, how something happened. So these are these are always in the same position here. I also want you to note something that is the mark of an advanced speaker is they always mirror what they do in a list. So here, whether you realize it or not, we have a list or a process of events. As such, they should mirror one another. So discreetly hid, quietly excused and rigidly walked is the way that we're going to mirror the structure of each section of the list. You should never do discreetly hid and excused yourself quietly and rigidly walked. It's just mixes up the pattern. And it's one of those things that comes across nonsensically to us. We don't get it. It's odd and it makes us have to stop and see it or ask you to say say it again so that we can understand what you mean. So if you want to come across far more fluently, you are going to have to learn how to keep the same pattern in a list. Alright, here's another one for you. I would like to meet with you briefly on a weekly basis to discuss matters of the utmost importance for sustainably growing this business. Go ahead and pause your video and break it down. Okay, let's see how you did here. I would like to meet with you briefly on a weekly basis to discuss matters of the utmost importance for sustainably growing this business. Okay, these adverbs are all doing different things. So let's take a look. Briefly is talking about how long. Meet with you how long. Okay, so this one's modifying meet with you. Would like is just standing alone up here. It is the the entrance to the entire sentence. What would the person like? This is the answer to all of that. So meet with is going to be a phrasal verb here. To meet with you and then how long? Briefly. You could also say to meet briefly with you on a weekly basis. How often? Of course, the utmost importance. How important of the utmost importance? And this is going to be over here. Sustainably growing this business. Here we have an adjective modifying business. Sustainably growing this business. Alright, guys, that is the end of our introduction to adjectives and adverbs for just warming you up to what you should already know as a B2 student getting ready to just jump into C1 material for adjectives and adverbs. If any of this was too difficult for you, this is as easy as it gets. This it's not going to get any easier from here. In fact, the next couple of lessons are going to be very difficult. So if you did not recognize some of the adjectives and adverbs I showed you today, then you need to go look them up. Look up each type, review them, use the Internet, use Google, you'll figure it out. You should already know these as B2 English speakers. If you did understand them, though, great. It is time to jump into C1 adjective and adverb grammar then. So let's go. Alright, so this is going to be what we jump into next. We're going to focus specifically, there's going to be a lot more to do with adjectives, but we're going to see both of them as we go. See you in the next one.