VERBS - Basic English Grammar - What is a VERB? - Types of VERBS - Regular/Irregular - State, Action

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• published: 18 Sep 2016
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In this lesson, you will learn what is a verb, and the different types of verbs there are in English. The lesson covers state (stative) and action (dynamic) verbs, main and helping (auxiliary) verbs, regular and irregular verbs, and transitive and intransitive verbs. For more FREE English lessons, SUBSCRIBE to this channel. Transcript: Hi and welcome back to our series of lessons on the parts of speech My name is Ganesh and this lesson is all about verbs. In this lesson I will teach you the different types of verbs that we have in English and I'll also show you how to avoid some common mistakes that students make with verbs. We will start with state and action verbs, and then we'll look at main and helping verbs, and then we'll turn to regular and irregular verbs, and finally we'll discuss transitive and intransitive verbs. Now before we begin as always if you have any questions at all you just have to let me know in the comments section and I'll talk to you there. OK so first of all what is a verb? Well a verb is just a word that shows an action or a state - state means a situation. And actually those are the two types of verbs - we call them state verbs and action verbs. Sometimes they're called stative and dynamic verbs but the meaning is the same. OK what's the difference between these two? The difference is that action verbs express physical activities or processes. For example verbs like kick, shout, run, climb, stand, sit, grow - all of these show us physical activities or processes. But a state verb is a verb that expresses a situation - for example, verbs like be, have, think, like and own are all state verbs. Now when I say "I have a large family" - here I'm using the state verb 'have'. That means I'm not talking about doing any physical action. I'm just telling you about a situation - in this case about my family. Or if I said "Julia likes chocolate ice cream." Is Julia doing any action in that sentence? No, that sentence just gives you some information about Julia. We're still using a verb - like - but it's a state verb Why is this difference important? And is it important at all? It is. Because there's an important rule in English that you should know and that rule is state verbs cannot be used in continuous form, you can only do that with action verbs. Let's look at a couple of examples. Now we can say "The children are playing in the park" or "Who's shouting?" Both of these sentences are correct because the verbs play and shout are physical actions, so we can use -ing forms. But we cannot say "I'm having a large family." or "Julia is liking chocolate ice cream." Both of those sentences are wrong They're common mistakes that some students make - some students use -ing forms with state verbs. Please don't make that mistake, and remember: no continuous forms with state verbs. OK let's now move on and talk about main and helping verbs. These are sometimes called auxiliary verbs as well. When a verb is used in a sentence, it can be used in two ways - it can either be used as the main verb of the sentence or it can be a helping verb - that is it can help the main verb. The most important helping verbs are be, do and have. Let's look at some examples with these: "Luciano is working now." In this sentence there are two verbs - can you tell me which are the two verbs? 'Is' and 'working' are the two verbs. Which is the main verb? The main verb is 'working' because that shows the action that is happening. Wo what about 'is'? What is it doing? 'Is' is a helping verb - that shows the tense of sentence. We know that Luciano is working now because we said 'is'. If I said Luciano was working, you know I'm talking about the past. So that helping verb is showing the tense, and that's one of the things that helping verbs can do. They can also help us to form negative sentences. For example "Luciano isn't working now" or questions - "I Is Luciano working now?" In all three of these sentences, the helping verb is 'be' or 'to be'. We're saying 'is' but that's just a form of the verb 'to be' - we say 'I am', 'you are', 'he is', 'she is, etc. The verbs 'do' and 'have' can also be helping verbs. For example, "I don't play golf every weekend" - maybe I'm talking to my friends and my friends say Hey you play golf every weekend right? and I say "No I don't play golf every weekend - I play tennis" for example, so 'don't' is 'do not' That's the negative form of the verb 'do' and it helps me to make a negative, or my friends could ask 'Do you play golf every weekend?" That's a question. Let's look at an example with the verb 'have' - "We have visited the UK four times" - here we know that the main verb is 'visited' but can you tell me what is the purpose of using 'have' in this sentence?