The Very Basics Of English Language :Learn English Today

Basics

The grammar of a particular language is the complete system which makes one language different from another. We know that German is different from French, for example. They sound different and, on the page, they look different What makes them different is a matter of grammar. Their grammars are different

It has been helpfully said that languages are 'rule governed'. That means that we can't just make them up anyhow and do what we like when we speak or write them. We know, much to our cost perhaps, that English has its own rather difficult and complicated spelling rules. If we want to check the way a word should be spelt, we can either look it up in a dictionary or use a computer spell checker. And we can be confident that the spelling of the word will stay the same.

Syntax

There are other rules too. If I write "cars blue" instead of "blue cars" you will immediately point out the words are in the wrong order. The same would apply to "field in a under sky grass blue a cows". You can, after a struggle decide what those words say, but in order to solve the problem you have to put the words in the right order. There are rules to do with the order of words in English (rules of Syntax) just as there are rules concerning the order of letters in a word.

Although the order of letters in a word in English remains the same, the actual letters in the word may change. Take the word "house", for example. You know very well that if I write "six house" I am making a mistake. I am breaking one of the rules of English. In order to make what I write correct, I have to put ajb"s" on the word "house". That is one of the grammar rules of English. It's known as the rule of inflection.

But what about "Houses is nice to live in"? You know that I mean more than one house because I've put an "s" on the word "house", but you are not satisfied with the word "is". You are quite sure it would be "are". Another of the rules of grammar is that we have to change "is" to "are" when we are talking about more than one thing. We call that agreement or concord.

Tenses

A sentence we would not expect to read in English would be :"I saw him tomorrow." And you could give two explanations. You could say that "tomorrow" should be changed to something like "yesterday" or "last week" ;or that "saw" should be changed to "will see". These are yet more rules of English, and they concern the relationship between the tense of a verb and related adverbs.

By now, you may have noticed the when we talk about rules, we often mean making things agree with each other. We have to do the right thing, otherwise there will be chaos. But rather than referring to these matters as 'rules', it is sometimes easier to see them as 'customs'. And a lot of misunderstandings in Language are solely caused because people, for various reasons, do not obey the customs in the language. It's the inability to do this of course, which causes so much trouble when you try and understand someone who doesn't speak your language very well. It also explains the strange and mystified expressions on the faces of those people whose countries you visit when you go on holiday. For various reasons, you are not using the foreign language in the customary way.

But when we talk about the customary way of speaking a language we're not just talking about grammar :we're also not talking about pronunciation, for example. When you listen to speakers of English and television, you can actually understand the people who speak like your English teachers, but others are very difficult to understand.

That will be all for today