Mastering Singular and Plural Nouns - English Grammar Class

1. Introduction to Beginner Grammar Course: Hello, and welcome to my beginner grammar course. If you're new to English grammar, welcome. My name is Ben and I'll be your instructor over these next ten lessons. In this beginner grammar course, we'll be covering singular and plural nouns, basic parts of speech, countable and uncountable nouns, possessive nouns, personal pronouns, using the verb to be, the most important verb in the English language, action verbs, adjectives, superlatives, comparatives, and adverbs. Over this ten week course, you'll learn about these ten topics, which I consider to be the most important grammar topics in the English language. You're going to see how these topics come about. What is the reasoning behind them? What are the examples we can use to learn more about them? How do we use nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and other parts of speech in the English language. You're also going to see many examples using sentences, using different kinds of examples using English vocabulary. I hope you're as excited as I am to begin. These ten Interactive videos will help you on your way to becoming a more accomplished English grammar learner. Now, this is just a beginner grammar course and there are other courses to come. But I'm glad you've chosen my English beginner grammar course, and I look forward to getting started. Thank you, and I'll see you in the next video. 2. Singular and Plural Nouns: Welcome back. This is lesson number one in the beginner grammar course. In this lesson, we're going to talk about singular and plural nouns. Probably the most basic yet very important grammar concept to master when it comes to English. It's a common fact that singular nouns form into the plural. But first, let's dive into what singular nouns are. I'll give you some examples. Listen carefully. Singular nouns. Here we have train house. Horse. Car. Plane. Now, these are all singular nouns. If we wanted to make them into plural, what do we do? It's quite simple actually. You really want to add the letter S. You can think of plural nouns as almost like an equation. You add the S to the end of each of these words. You have trains, houses, horses, cars, and planes. Now you can see singular nouns, without the, por nouns with the. Train becomes trains, House becomes houses, horse becomes horses, Car becomes, plane becomes planes. Good. Sometimes though, when you want to make a singular noun plural, you sometimes have to add es. When it comes to singular nouns, that end in S, C S. When you comes to these singular nouns, the plural nouns and in E S. Let's get you some examples. Listen carefully. Bench CH becomes benches. SH becomes ashes. Bus becomes buses. Candy becomes candies. Or As you can see, all these examples end in E. These are all pal and these are all singular, singular and pal. In this case, it's not just adding an S, but it's adding an ES. But there are also some nouns that end in a consonant like, and makes the noun plural by dropping the y and adding IES. If you have singular nouns with y, Baby becomes babies. Candy becomes candies. We also have one more example here. Party becomes parties. Here we have ES, but then we have I E S. Your plural nouns will be S, ES, or I E S. Now there are also some irregular noun pals that don't have a specific rule, but which come up every now and then. In order to make a noun pal, sometimes we don't use S, ES or I ES, sometimes they're irregular to become plural, which means more than one. Singular is just one. Plural is more than one. Remember that when we talk about singular, it means one, whereas plural, it means two or more. Let's continue with the irregular noun changes. Okay. Irregular noun singular examples and plural examples. Let us show how it becomes plural in this case when we don't use S, ES, or IES even. All right. A good example for this is woman. We don't say, that's not correct. We have to change it to the only change we're making here is from AN to EN. I'll give you just a written example. There is one woman. That's singular, just one woman. But for plural, there are let's say ten women. You're seeing the shift from singular to por and that's an irregular noun change. I'll give you a few more examples. Let's say, make a line. Man becomes men. Same thing, changing an to en to make it a noun. Mouse. This is a bit of a shift to mice. We don't say mouses. We say mice when there's more than one for poor and half changes to halves, which is not so irregular, but VS is different. You're dropping the f and you're adding v, which is very unusual. So nouns have the same form in both the singular and the plural form. But you don't make any changes to the noun itself. I'll give you some examples where they don't change. This is the irregular where it's not changing to S or ES to make it a plural noun. But there are also examples where singular and plural are the same, which I'll show you in a moment. Singular equals plural for these nouns. Singular equals plural for these nouns. The noun doesn't change regardless if it's singular or plural. I'll give you a few examples. Okay. I colored markers don't seem to be working. That's better. All right. Der. Sorry about the colors. Deer, sheep. Then we also have fish, and then aircraft. In this case, one aircraft, two aircraft, one fish, two fish, one sheep, two sheep, one deer, two deer. We can't add S, can add ES to make it plural, or we can't even add IES. Singular equals poral for these nouns. Deer, sheep, fish, aircrafts are just a few examples when you don't change the noun. It stays the same for singular and plural. There are also some nouns that have a plural form, but only take a singular form, like the news, for example. Let's just show you an example where the singular form is the only one. Singular only, let's say. Have you seen the news today? News is singular. There's no plural to news, but we use the singular form. We don't say news. We just say news. Have you seen the news today? Or sports? Sports is an example of the plural being there or being singular only in the form? The sports team was very successful. It's just a singular form. There's no plural to sports or news. There are sometimes there's also just plural only. These are only singular, but then there's also plural only nouns that don't have a singular form. So plural noun only. No, singular. Some examples of nouns that only take the plural form are glasses, genes, let's say, goods, like things to buy. Also stairs, And what else let's say let's say, Let's say wages, wages, meaning, you know, the money you earn. These five examples are plural only. Plural now only, there's no singular form to them. You can't say I have a glass for vision. You would say glasses. You're not wearing jean, you're wearing jeans. You're buying goods. You don't buy one good, you just buy goods in general. Stairs, you climb the stairs, you don't climb the stair. Wages, you earn wages. You don't really earn you guess you could say you earn a wage, but in terms of just its usage, it's plural only. So that's pretty much the main topic when it comes to sign or and poral nouns. To review, you want to change it from train to trains or house to houses, horse to horses for S. If you want to change singular noun to plural noun, you want to add es, bench to benches, ash to ashes, bus becomes buses. If you have a Y, if you have a consonant at the end of your noun, you want to change it from baby to babies or from cherry to cherries, Sometimes we have an irregular singular nouns that change to be plural, but in different ways, like we talked about, Woman becomes women, man becomes men, mouse becomes mice, and then half becomes halves. Then we also have singular and plural, the form is the same, like deer, sheep, fish, aircraft. Then then we have words like news and sports that only have a singular verb form that can't become plural, or have a fixed plural form and take a plural verb like trousers, jeans, glasses, wages, and goods. I want you to keep that in mind. Singular and plural nouns. You have to know how to change it from singular to plural, like we talked about. It depends on the noun itself. But I think you have a good understanding now at the end of this video. I hope you'll take this knowledge with you to your activities for this course. I wish you good luck, and I'll see you in the next video. Thank you.