English verbs
Verbs are one of the four main parts of speech in English. The other three are nouns, adjectives and adverbs.
Verbs are used to describe an action or a state in English. We can put verbs into different forms to give extra information, such as changing the tense to show when something happened.
For example, you can say “I go to the beach every day” to show that this is a daily, repeated routine. However, you could change the verb tense from present to past and say “I went to the beach” to express that this action happened in the past and is now finished.
As well as tense, we can change the aspect, mood and voice of a verb by adding auxiliary verbs, such as “English is spoken here”, which is passive voice, instead of “We speak English here” in the active voice.
Verbs might seem a bit difficult when you’re learning English, but this series of video lessons will help you to understand the main grammatical rules so you can use English verbs with much more confidence.
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6 itemsModal verbs | Grammar
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Modal verbs are used in English to show how someone feels about something. Modal verbs can be used to show ability, obligation, permission, probability, and willingness.
For example, you can express ability by saying "I CAN help you". This means I am able to help you. I have the ability to help ...
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5 itemsPassive voice | Grammar
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We use the passive voice in English when we want to focus on the object of the action and not the subject. The passive is used for different reasons, such as not knowing who did an action, or if we want to sound more formal.
To write a passive sentence, we need to change the structure of the sen...
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6 itemsReported speech | Grammar
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We use reported speech to tell someone what another person said. This is useful if we're reporting something which is now in the past or that may not be true anymore.
For example, if someone says to you "I want to learn English", you can report that to another person as: SHE SAID SHE WANTED to l...
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2 itemsRelative clauses | Grammar
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Relative clauses are a very useful way of adding extra information to a sentence in English. It can tell us more about the sentence. It is also a very helpful way to help us connect two sentences together, which will improve our writing in English.
We add extra information to a sentence by using...
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5 itemsConditionals | Grammar
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Conditionals are a type of sentence in English that refer to a real or unreal situation in the past, present or future. We sometimes call them 'if' clauses, because the word 'if' is normally the key part of this type of sentence.
There are four types of conditional sentence, the zero, first, sec...
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5 itemsPerfect tenses | Grammar
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In English, we have the past, present and future tenses. Perfect tenses are sometimes referred to the retrospective tense. This means we use perfect tenses to look back from a point in time.
To make a perfect tense, we use a form of the auxiliary verb 'have' and the past participle. For example,...
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6 itemsVerb patterns | Grammar
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Verb patterns refer to the way we use certain verbs with other verbs in a sentence in English. It’s important to understand verb patterns in order to sound natural in English, but the wrong verb pattern can also affect the meaning of a sentence.
Some verbs are followed by the ‘to’ infinitive, su...