Adjectives

In this lesson, we are going to talk about the adjective. The adjective describes a person, a place or a thing. Therefore, you know that a adjective describes a noun because we remember that a person, a place or a thing is a noun. So therefore, again, the adjective describes a noun. So let's take a look here. In front of me, you should not say, oh look, boy is an adjective, or school is an adjective. No, what I've done is I've come up with two nouns. Remember, person, place or things are both nouns. School is a place. A boy is a person.

So, why have I put them here? Because we, starting with boy, are going to describe them. The boy could be happy. The boy could be sad. The boy could be calm. The boy could be anxious.

All of these words are describing him, possible, and therefore, because they're describing him, these words here starting with happy, ending with anxious over here, these words are adjectives. Now let's take a look at school. School could be fun. School is fun.

That word fun is describing school, so therefore fun is an adjective. How else could you describe school? Well, maybe school is difficult for various reasons. But remember, as long as this word is describing, can be used to describe something, it is an adjective.

So school can be fun, school can be difficult, or school can just seem like it goes on forever. School is long, never seems to end. So again, these words here are all adjectives describing in this case the noun boy up here with these guys, and down here school with these guys. Okay.

So hopefully, you got it now. You know that words that describe nouns are adjectives, because what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna throw three sentences at you. Uh-oh. We have nouns, verbs and adjectives. And we're looking for the adjective. It's always a good idea, though, to look for the noun because we know that the adjective describes the noun. Therefore, the noun helps. Now, this is a noun. Put an N underneath it. What words in the sentence describe the house?

The words dark and quiet. And therefore, they are adjectives. Notice that there are two adjectives because just like the boy from the preceding slide, we saw that the boy could be all of these things. Here, the house is just two things, but again, when we describe something, we can use one adjective or we could use many.

Now let's look at the next one here, B, where it says, The big dog barked at the scary man. So when we're looking for adjectives, we wanna identify where are the nouns. The first noun I see, the thing is the dog. There's a noun. Now, does any word describe that dog?

If you go over here and say, well, barked. Is a dog a barked? Well, that dog is barked. No, not at all, because a dog, because barked is something that the dog is doing and is therefore a verb. But let's take a look at that word big, the big dog. Notice big comes before the noun, and it describes the noun dog. Big is an adjective. Is that the only one? Is there another noun somewhere here? What about scary? Is scary a noun?

Is it a thing? Oh look, it is a scary. No of course not, because it is not a thing. The thing here is the man. The man is the noun. Now, how is the man being described?

He's scary. So, scary is an adjective. So, we can have a sentence with many nouns. Any one of those nouns can have an adjective. And then we go to C, Mary was hungry and was hoping to eat some nutritious food. So, what word describes the noun?

The first noun here, hun, Mary. Mary is what? Well, Mary is being described as hungry, so hungry is an adjective. Was hoping to eat some nutritious food. What does the word nutritious mean? Nutritious means full of nutrients, and it's describing what? The food, which is a noun. Therefore, nutritious is an adjective. Now, one final thing before I leave us here, and this is something we'll talk about more later and we'll see lots more of. But where does the adjective come? Because sometimes it comes, in the case of B, right before the noun.

The big dog. Other times, in the case of A, it comes after the noun. And so in English, there's sometimes certain verbs, such as was or is, to be verbs. And this one is the past tense, was the past tense of is. And so when you're describing something, you can say it was adjective. Whatever adjective you want to come up with, that is fine. Or you could say, the dark house. And now, the word dark comes before house. You do not need the verb was if the adjective comes before the noun, the way that big comes here. However, if you just have the word the dark house or the words the dark house, that is not an actual sentence.

And I'm gonna stop there because learning about sentences and fragments is gonna come in the next series of videos. But for now, from this video we know an adjective describes a noun.