Is grammar a nightmare for you? It is so for most language learners. But grammar is an integral part of a language that you cannot simply ignore. And you needn’t worry about it all the time too!
Here are a few essential things that you need to know at the outset, and things will fall into place as you make progress each day.
Enrich Your Vocabulary
Start by taking one step at a time. While you may dream of speaking or writing flawless sentences, try learning new words first. Learn as many as you can. You can even set a target of the number of words you will learn each day. Try translating words from your mother tongue to their English counterparts. They are sure to come in handy once you start framing sentences.
Know The Parts of Speech
Once you learn a word, find out which category it would fall into- whether it’s a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, article, and conjunction, etc. Remember that some words can be used as both noun and verb depending on the context they are used in.
Identifying these words and placing them into their corresponding parts of speech categories will give you a better understanding of how they can be placed in a sentence.
Focus on Subject-Verb Agreement
This is where most people tend to go wrong. If the subject in the sentence is singular, the verb is followed by an ‘s’ or ‘es’. But if the subject is plural, the verb remains in its base form.
Eg: The boy plays football every evening.
The boys play football in the evenings.
Know Your Tenses Well
If you make mistakes in the tenses used, the whole idea of your communication could go astray. So plan before you speak, as to whether you would be talking about something that happened yesterday or something that’s going on now, or you want to be imperative by instructing someone and so on. Use the right tense forms to aid in communication that’s devoid of any confusion.
Keep your Eyes and Ears Open
While you watch and hear people talking, or shows on TV, or anything on the internet, be careful to grasp how sentences are framed. Of course, people do use slang expressions that may not be grammatically perfect, but it takes you one step closer to speaking.
Speak, make mistakes, unlearn, and speak again!
This would be a never-ending process where you would be preferably having someone to correct you whenever there is a bump. Be open to criticism because it’s ultimately going to help no one but you! Unlearn your mistakes and try to correct them the next time you speak. Remember that failure is the stepping stone to success. Keep falling, keep getting up and you are sure to make progress on the way!
The courses at English House, India’s best online English learning platform is aimed at easing the seemingly-complicated aspects of English grammar and help you walk past the stumbling block called grammar.
