Simple and compound sentences | Syntax | Khan Academy

Hello Garans, hello Paige, hi David. I say hello to you, and I say hello to the Garans. That was an interesting thing to say. Yeah, it's because there was a compound sentence.

I see, so there's this distinction made in grammar between simple and compound sentences, and today, Paige, you and I are going to cover those differences. Let's do it!

A simple sentence is really just what it says on the tin. A simple sentence consists of one subject and one predicate, and that's it, right? So, in the sentence "I bought my friends some candy," all right, we got our one subject "I," and then we have our one predicate "bought my friends some candy."

Mhm. Now, all of this together is what we'd call an independent clause. I don't want to hit that too hard right now, but you know when you have this set of subject and a predicate together and it can be a sentence, that's called an independent clause.

Um, I'm not even going to write that down. Yeah, but a compound sentence is basically two or more simple sentences joined together. Mhm. So that would be two subjects plus two predicates or more—two, three, a bajillion!

Sure, that would be a very long sentence to read, but you could do it. It would be a very, very compound sentence. Yeah, so I visited the beach, and I got a really bad sunburn. Mhm. Um, when we're looking at this, this is really two sentences together joined by the comma and this "and," right?

So we have our subject "I visited the beach," "I got a really bad sunburn," and we have our two predicates: "I visited the beach" and "got a really bad sunburn." So the subject in both these cases is "I," right?

But it's sort of separate. It's like I am doing two different actions, correct? Right. What's important is like even if it's the same subject, if it's "I" both times—well, I don't know how to say this, but just like if it were like "I visited the beach and got a really bad sunburn," then it would be a simple sentence. Then it's simple.

So, okay, so Paige. So I'm looking at this, and I see "I" twice. What if I wanted to condense this sentence further? Okay, what does that give us? Is this a simple sentence or a compound sentence?

Because this looks like what you would call a compound predicate, right? Since there's only one subject in this sentence, there's only "I," and it's only said once, right? You don't have "I visited the beach" and "I got a really bad sunburn."

That whole thing "visited the beach and got a really bad sunburn" is, you're right, it is a compound predicate. But what you're saying is I couldn't divide this up into two sentences unless I put in another subject, right?

You can say "I visited the beach," but—and that can be a sentence on its own—but you can't say "and got a really bad sunburn" as its own sentence. Okay, so both of these things are simple. So this has—this is even though this is a compound predicate, it's technically one predicate, right?

It's—and even if I'd written "PA and I visited the beach and got a really bad sunburn," that would still be a compound subject, but it wouldn't be two sentences squished together. It would be one kind of long sentence, right?

You can have a compound subject or a compound predicate, but that doesn't make it a compound sentence. What makes it a compound sentence is you have two parts that can stand on their own as individual sentences, and they're sort of being put together.

So let me change what I wrote here to just say instead of two subjects and two predicates, because I think that's confusing in light of this information, let's just say it is two simple sentences, right? Or two independent clauses if you know that terminology.

Yeah, and if you don't, never fear! We'll cover it, and you can learn anything.

David out. Paige out.