ENGLISH LEARNING: Why verbs are important and useful to learn...

 What is a verb? How can we use verbs? Why are verbs useful to learn when learning English?

In this blog we will look at these questions and their answers.

What is a verb?

A verb refers to a word that describes an action. This action can be physical or mental. Verbs come in three tenses which are past, present and future. Past refers to before or yesterday or in the past. Present refers to now, right now or the current things happening. And lastly future refers to tomorrow or a time still to come. It is important to remember that a verb will help you to express something which is happening or which you can see or feel happening.

How can we use verbs?

Make sure which tense you are in. Are you in past, present or future tense? Now you can make sure that your verb has the correct tense as well. The main job of the verb is to show you what the subject is doing or feeling. There will be a verb in every sentence otherwise the sentence does not make sense.

Example: I like my dog. (like is how you feel about the dog, how the 'I' feels, so it is a verb)

                I am going to the shops. (going to is what you are doing, what 'I' is doing in this sentence)

It's not really important that you know that there are 6 types of verbs or that they are split into 3 categories. For those who want to know the 6 types though, they are: dynamic action verbs, stative state-of-being verbs, verbs that can be dynamic or stative, auxiliary helping verbs, modal auxiliary verbs, AND phrasal verbs. If you're interested in the verb categories, they are: transitive, intransitive, and ditransitive. I'm giving you these names so that you can search them on grammarly or other very useful blogs.

How you use a verb relies on knowing your tense and the verb form which is necessary for this specific tense. 

The root refers to the most basic form of a word with no changes left to make to the word. 3rd person singular present tense (there is a preposition blog post as well) will add an -s at the end of the root verb, or when ending in a consonant or a -y, you will change it to -ies. If the word ends in a vowel and a -y, then you can add an s to the root word. With simple past tense we add -ed to the root word. For the present participle we can add an -ing to the root word, BUT always remove the 'e' before adding the -ing. With the past participle just remember that irregular verbs will be different than the simple past tense.

Therefore, make sure you find the root of your verb and build your sentence and tense from there!

Why are verbs useful to learn when learning English?

EVERY sentence has a verb in it. Verbs show us what is happening, what will happen or what has happened. That is why verbs are considered the building-blocks of speaking and writing in English. When you understand verbs and how to use them then you can express yourself effectively in English. On YouTube we have a whole series on basic and commonly used verbs in English.