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

Helping verbs | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Hello, Garans.

Now, we've already talked about how verbs can show actions and link concepts, and today I'd like to talk about a third function of the verb, which is helping other verbs. Now, we call this the helping verb. You may have heard it called that, or the auxiliary verb, and these are just two words for the same thing. Auxiliary is just a more Latin way to say helping; that's all it means.

Now, I've brought along an image of my friend Brian to help explain this principle. What helping verbs are is really just inflected forms of the verbs "to have" and "to be." As we get deeper into the verb, I'll explain what each one means in each one of its different versions. But for now, suffice it to say that I'm just going to throw out some examples just so you can see what it means for a helping verb to be a helping verb.

The specific way in which helping verbs help is that they establish certain facts about a sentence, usually when they're happening in time. We'll get more and more into that as we get more into tenses and aspect, but I just want to give you some examples.

So here we have Brian is eating a pizza. Brian and I love pizza; we used to eat a lot of pizza. Brian has eaten a pizza. Brian was eating a pizza. And finally, Brian had been eating a pizza.

So the presence of all these helping verbs has different effects depending on which ones you use. As I said, we'll get into those later, but just for a brief overview, for example, um, let's see. Brian is eating a pizza; that suggests that it's going on now. Brian has eaten a pizza; that means he had done it; it's over in the past. Brian was eating a pizza, which means he was in the middle of eating a pizza when something happened. And finally, Brian had been eating a pizza, so he was doing it, and then he stopped at some point in time.

This is just the most basic introduction to helping verbs. So, verbs can show actions, verbs can link concepts, and verbs can help other verbs. You can learn anything!

David out.

More Articles

View All
Worked example: Derivative of ln(Ãx) using the chain rule | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
So we have here F of x being equal to the natural log of the square root of x. What we want to do in this video is find the derivative of F. The key here is to recognize that F can actually be viewed as a composition of two functions, and we can diagram t…
Civil society | Citizenship | High school civics | Khan Academy
Civil society is one of those terms that you might hear in a politician’s speech, maybe in a line about the importance of maintaining a strong relationship between the government and civil society. But what does it actually mean? A society that’s civilize…
A 750-Year-Old Secret: See How Soy Sauce Is Still Made Today | Short Film Showcase
In a small coastal town in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, the traditional streets and buildings hold one of the best-kept secrets of Japanese Gastronomy. For it was here, in the 13th century, that soy sauce, as we know it, was first established and produced.…
Adding multi digit numbers with place value
What we’re going to do in this video is get some practice adding multiple digit numbers. But the point of it isn’t just to get the answer, but to understand why the method we use actually works. So we’re going to add 40,762 to 30,473, and you can pause t…
The Second Great Awakening - part 2
In the last video, I started discussing the Second Great Awakening, which was this era of increased religious fervor, religious conversion, and religiously inspired social action that happened in the early 19th century of the United States’ history. So ap…
Khan Academy and the Common Core
[Voiceover] A lot of users of Khan Academy, especially teachers, don’t fully know how much we have mapped and how much we have invested in the actual Common Core. As I often point out to folks, a standard is one thing, and the Common Core standards are de…