yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Intro to adverbs | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Hello grammarians! Today we are going to talk skillfully and patiently about adverbs and what it is that adverbs do. In order to do that, I think it might be useful to talk about what adjectives do first.

So, adjectives can modify stuff. I should have been clearer in the last video and said that the stuff they modify is nouns, but I didn't want to introduce too many rules and strictures. What adjectives modify is nouns and only nouns. Adverbs modify everything else.

So, adverbs modify everything that's not a noun. The way we usually see this applied is with verbs, and it's right there in the name: to add verbs. This comes from the Latin meaning "on" or "to" verbs, action words. Adverbs are words that you slap on to verbs.

Basically, what I imagined when I think of adverbs is, I kind of see like a sticker. Here's this sticker: we've got "slowly." So we can take this thing and turn it into a sticker. Boop! Move it around. Do we like it?

We can write a sentence like "Grayson ran, Boop, slowly." You know, and "slowly" here refers back to "ran." It's how he ran, not really describing Grayson. It's modifying or describing the action of running. "Perle arranged the furniture slowly." Boop! Little sticker we just put on there.

But a word is also considered an adverb if it modifies adjectives. So, let's say adverbs modify verbs and adjectives. We could say something like, "Vanessa was very hungry," right? Because "hungry" is an adjective and "very" is doing this thing where it's modifying "hungry."

It's not "Vanessa wasn't very"; you can't be "very." "Very" is not an adjective, but it is a modifier, and the word that it's modifying is "hungry." How hungry was Vanessa? Vanessa was very hungry. Vanessa could also be slightly hungry.

This leads me to one of the most important things about adverbs, which is that generally they tend to have "ly" on them. So generally, the way to make an adverb is to just take an adjective and add "ly" to it.

You take the word "slow," ya del "ly," you get the adverb "slowly." You take the word "nice," ya del "ly," you get the adverb "nicely." You take the adjective "cheerful," and now "ly," you get the adverb "cheerfully."

So adverbs modify everything that isn't a noun, and that means that they modify verbs and adjectives. The way you make an adverb most of the time is by just taking an adjective and tacking on "ly" to the end of it. It's like a sticker that you put on top of a verb or an adjective.

That's what adverbs are, and that's what they do. And what you can do is learn anything! Damn it!

More Articles

View All
Absurdism: Life is Meaningless
Sisyphus was a great king of Greek mythology. So clever, he was able to outwit the gods themselves. Twice he cheated death; first by capturing Thanatos, the god of death, then by tricking the goddess of the underworld, Persephone, into releasing him back …
Behind the Scenes With Director Everardo Gout | MARS
Presented by Acura. Precision crafted performance. Retro Rockets are about to fire in 1, 2, 3! Hello, my name is Ardo Good, and I’m the director of the miniseries. I was drawn to this project mainly because of two things. One is that I always try to look…
2001 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting (Full Version)
Right, and, uh, Andy, if you’re here, you can stand up. I think the crowd would like to say thanks. [Applause] We have one other special guest who, uh, after, uh, doing an incredible job for, uh, all Berkshire shareholders, and particularly for Charlie an…
Justification with the mean value theorem: table | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
The table gives selected values of the differentiable function f. All right, can we use a mean value theorem to say that there is a value c such that f prime of c is equal to 5 and c is between 4 and 6? If so, write a justification. Well, to use the mean…
Ray Dalio & Bill Belichick on Going from Nothing to Something Big: Part 2
And then communicating well, because when I went from the 67 who knew me and knew where I was coming from, and then I had to go to another level, how was I going to keep that same communication, that same idea of meritocracy? That’s why I started to write…
Q&A With Grey: Millenia of Human Attention Edition
Hello Internet! I asked for questions, and boy, did you deliver with more than 7,000, so, let’s get started. Question: Immortality! Aging is a degenerative fatal disease of the genes in the same way Parkinson’s is. We’re trying to cure Parkinson’s with g…