Lesson 1: the basics
Hi and welcome to the first English lesson! In this lesson, we'll go over the basics. Since primary school, you all have had some sort of English classes in your life. So I expect that you already know the English alphabet, but for those that are completely new to English, I'll help out with learning it. English as you know is a major language. Many countries around the world speak English as their first or as an official language. Some people might ask me "Jeff, why bother learning English when I can just speak my native language?". My answer to that question is simple, in today's society one must know at least one other language if they want to be successful with their job. English is considered an international language, so that means people around the world can speak English to some degree. English is written with Latin letters. Once you know how to speak English, that will make learning the other Germanic and romance languages easier to learn. Today, we'll talk about basic word order.
The sentence above is an excellent example to show basic word order. Before I get into basic word orders in English, I advise you to take notes as they will be very useful in the future! As you know by now, English is a SVO language. Most European languages use the SVO format to write sentences in. Once you know how to make a basic sentence in English, things will start becoming easier as we progress, just keep that in mind. I'll color code the parts of speech so that it will be easier to take notes on. The colors that I've selected are: Green for the subject, red for the verbs, and blue for the objects.
I took the example sentence and I labeled the parts of speech. Let's go over this. You might ask "Jeff, how can I tell what the subject is?". Remember, the subject is the noun that is doing the action and the object receives the action. In this sentence the word "I" is the subject. What is the subject doing? The subject subject Kicked. What did the subject kick? The subject kicked Ball. So the subject is I, the action is kick, and the object is ball. You might noticed that I skipped over the word "the". That is because I'll cover it in a later lesson. Okay, now that we know how basic word order works, I think that we have covered a lot in this lesson. After a certain amount of lessons, I want to quiz you to see what you have learned. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them, and I'll see you next time!
Lesson 2: Motivation
Hello everyone and welcome to the second lesson! Today's lesson is all about motivation to learn English. You have probably heard something like "If you are a native Vietnamese speaker, then English will be very hard to learn." This statement is somewhat true, but it is to dishearten those that actually want to learn the language. Native English speakers, like myself, are always disheartened by the fact that most of the languages we want to learn are very difficult for us. That is based on opinion though, what you may find hard, I find easy and vice versa. Some people like myself learn a lot more quickly than others, it doesn't mean we are good students or anything, it just means that we pick up on things quicker. Those that take time to learn things might take efficient notes that would benefit them when it comes to learning. You might be asking yourself "What is the fastest way that I can learn English?" Sorry to burst your bubble, but to learn a language efficiently, one must take the time and effort to practice everyday. However, there are ways where you can learn English fairly quickly, it is to have fun studying English. By spicing up your English studies, you can improve greatly! When I teach English to my students, I try to make learning fun. If I spoke in monotone when I teach English, I wouldn't be a very good English tutor. When I teach, I'm usually very energetic about teaching my native language. As I said in the last lesson, English is a very important language to learn. Without knowledge in English, you probably wouldn't get a good paying job, and you wouldn't be able to communicate with a lot of people. Remember, always try your best, no matter if you think that English is the most boring thing ever. If you feel like you're getting nowhere in your English studies, then move on to something new in English, and ask native speakers for advice. I encourage my students to do well, so I hope this short motivational lesson helped those that lack the motivation needed to learn English. The next lesson will be about nouns. If you have any questions, then feel free to contact me at anytime and I'll answer them quickly! I'll see you next week!
Lesson 3: nouns
Hello and welcome to the third lesson! As I stated last week, we will be going over nouns. A noun as you might already know is any person, place, thing, or idea. In English, we have many words to describe one thing, many of those words are nouns. Out of the 1,000,000+ words in English, there are thousands upon thousands of nouns, but we will focus on the more commonly used ones. Depending on the sentence, the noun can also be a word that isn't usually a noun. Here is an example:
The simple sentence above is an example of showing some nouns. As you might of noticed, there are two verbs side-by-side in this sentence. We'll go over it in a little bit, but for now let's focus on the noun. "John" is a noun, but not just any ordinary noun, it is a proper noun. A proper noun is a name of a noun. Names of people, cities, buildings, boats, countries, etc... are examples of proper nouns.
I already labeled the nouns of the sentence. You might ask "Jeff, when are you going to talk about the two verbs?". Well, there is a specific name for words like "running" and they are called gerunds. A gerund is a verb that acts as a noun. The suffix ing indicates that a verb is a gerund. I want you to take what I've taught you so far and take notes. That is all I have for this lesson, next week we will talk about nouns and verbs. See you next week!