Loving the grammar
Last Tuesday my Ukrainian friend and former student Y had two requests from her teenage daughter Ve, whom I have started teaching on a pro bono basis. Ve wanted some lessons on English grammar and parts of speech. And she wanted her friend Va to join the lesson.
Good news!
Ve is 16 and quite shy, so I’ve been encouraging her to tell me what she wants and needs from our lessons. I love it when she dares to ask for something.
I’m also encouraged that she actually asked for grammar. When I first met her, over three years ago, she could barely speak any English. Now her English is good, and she’ll be sitting GCSEs this academic year.
So, for the first time, I found myself teaching a whole lesson on parts of speech yesterday afternoon. And in the process of teaching, I realised a few things.
Firstly, I know the names and functions of the parts of speech in English. However, although I have been learning Greek with a teacher for the past four or five years, I still don’t know all their names in Greek even though my lovely teacher Eva uses them all the time. I suppose I’ve never made a concerted effort, and unlike my GCSE students, I won’t be examined on them.
But on to the lesson itself. In English, it’s often not possible to identify the part of speech from the form of a word. Many words can be either a verb or a noun, depending on context: address, thought, branch, sin, trim, lift, shape, ride, top, run… there are thousands of them.
By contrast, in most of the languages I know (including bits of Ukrainian), verbs have distinctive forms. They’re easy to identify although they're not easy to conjugate!
Even so, a quick “cheat” in English for Va and Ve is that if you can put "to" in front of a word, it’s functioning as a verb. And if you can put "a" or "the" in front of it, it’s functioning as a noun.
As for adjectives, they’re easy to identify, aren’t they? For the likes of us, maybe —but not for teenagers. Then I realised that for Ukrainian speakers there’s another “cheat”: translate the word into Ukrainian. If it “obeys” the noun it goes with, it’s an adjective. It changes its ending depending on the noun—masculine, feminine, neuter; singular, plural; nominative, accusative, and so on.
Teaching Ve and Va reminded me that learning a language is not just about rules and labels. It’s about paying attention, learning to spot patterns and feeling how words behave. Grammar becomes interesting and relevant when it no longer seems like a set of abstract terms, but a way of noticing.