If you checked the last article about verb tenses, you may be feeling a sense of achievement by now, and you should. A big part of learning a language is being able to convey meaning, and that is something you can do already, so congrats! Let’s raise the bar a little bit. Just when you finally think you understand the tenses, you run into irregular verbs.

There are over 170 irregular verbs in English, and they all break the standard rules as most words do. Today I play, yesterday I played. Simple, right? The thing with irregular verbs is that there isn’t a rule you can learn for them. The only solution? Memorize them.

How to know if a verb is irregular

Let’s first define what an irregular verb is. Regular verbs have an established pattern through all their tenses. Usually, the only thing you have to do to form one is add -ed  at the end of the word and that’s it. For example:

Following up with our explanation about verbs, in this article I will address this topic that has proven to be quite challenging for English students, verb tenses. Besides showing the action or state of being in the sentence, the verb also indicates the time this action took place.

There are some languages (Thai for example), where the verb has basically one form, no matter if the sentence is about the past, the present, or the future, the verb is the same. In these cases, extra words – Tomorrow, yesterday, now and so forth – indicate the time. This is not the case in English. In this language, six different verb tenses express time, and each of these tenses places the action or the state of being at a point in time.

Three of the six English tenses are called simple and the other three are called perfect. My intention here is not to go deep into their construction, but rather to touch upon the basis of each. Will address each one in detail in further articles, although I will go further into the present perfect tense as it is so common.

A verb in a sentence is like a set of tires in a truck. Let’s say you load your truck with ideas that you want to deliver to another person. You can be certain that without a good set of tires, those ideas will never get to its destination. That is what verbs do, they are the vehicle that takes what you want to say from one point to another. Every sentence needs one, and you need to start using one if you want to do anything with it. There are different types of verbs, and in this article, I will explain you two different types of verbs and when to use each of them. These are linking verbs and action verbs. Let’s get started.

Linking verbs express a situation or a state rather than an action or a process. They consist of several types of verbs. With these verbs, math intersects with English in a way, because these verbs are like a giant equal sign placed in the middle of your sentence. For example, you can think of the sentence

I mentioned in the last article about the existence of different types of grammar, and yes, In English, there are different types of grammar. The use of one over the other will greatly depend on the context and situation we are. Some of the types we can mention are historical (how language has changed through the centuries), comparative (the similarities or differences between languages), theoretical (studies the essential components of any human language), and so on.

I can see you scratching your head already and thinking if you should have studied Italian instead, but don’t despair. Although there are different types of grammar, you only have to know two of them in order to improve your speech and your writing.

Descriptive grammar gives name to things – the parts of speech and parts of a sentence. When you learn descriptive grammar, you understand what every word is (its part of speech) and what every word does (its function in the sentence). To put in in simple terms, it is a set of rules that are based upon how a language is actually used.

Be careful though, if you study it beyond a certain point you will find yourself saying things like “balloon” is the object of the gerund, in a gerund phrase that is acting as the predicate nominative of the linking verb “appear”. Trust me, you don’t want to get to be in this position. However, there is one important reason to learn some grammar terms, and that is to understand why a particular word or phrase is correct or incorrect.

In the middle ages, grammar meant the study of Latin, the language educated people used to study. In fact, grammar was so closely associated with Latin that the word referred to any kind of learning. These days, however, it refers to the study of language, specifically, how words are put together. For some teachers, it means a set of standards that you must follow to speak and write “better”. This definition of “better” is quite subjective, as it changes according to the audience, purpose, and situation.

The study of grammar is a must, but it needs to be taking care of in a very intelligent way. Although it is true that structure is required to make progress in the language, there’s a tendency in classrooms of teaching grammar rules in a way that a student cannot relate the content with real situations. For example. Let’s say you want to learn the simple past. You will obviously need to do some grammar exercises to understand how to use it. However, if you are asked to write the bio of your favorite basketball player, you will feel passionate for doing the task, and you will start using the structures way often, I can tell you that.