Many English learners and non-native speakers believe that they need to master verb tenses to be fluent in English. Does this sound like you? While verb tenses are important, English Grammar Explained will demonstrate that they represent a fraction of what makes for good English grammar.
Your focus on verb tenses may leave you struggling with making clear sentences. Additionally, you find yourself making common mistakes because you don’t put enough importance on the relationships between the parts of speech. Such errors include things like poor word order, incorrect part-of-speech relationships, and illogical or broken sentence structure.
What if the key to better English grammar wasn’t just about verb tenses but understanding how sentence structure and the parts of speech work together – as true building blocks of English?
By turning your focus to sentence structure and the parts of speech, you can create grammatically correct sentences. These sentences express your thoughts clearly. Even better, your mastery of sentence structure makes learning verb tenses easier. As presented in English Grammar Explained, becoming proficient in sentence building reduces mistakes and improves your fluency.
Understanding the Common Misconception About English Grammar
I had a former student come to me recently. He wanted to resume his English lessons after a 3-year break. He told me about his desire to do a reset on his grammar – starting right from the beginning. His words were “I want to revise all the verb tenses.”
To that statement, I responded “That’s not the beginning.” He looked at me, puzzled and said “The verb tenses aren’t the beginning.” Then I handed him my book, English Grammar Explained, and told him this is where it starts.
I then asked him if he had ever learned the 8 parts of speech for English.
His puzzled look deepened. “No, what’s that?”
I told him that he has surely learned about many of these parts – verbs, nouns, adjectives. The problem is, he hadn’t learned the parts of speech as an interconnected concept.
The 8 Parts of Speech have relationships that All English learners should study
There are relationships between the 8 parts of speech. In my full post on “How to Identify Parts of Speech,” I explain that each one has a function in the sentence, relating to the other parts of speech. While in Europe, most English resources center around coursebooks that teach topical vocabulary and verb tenses.
Every student I have ever encountered here in Poland think like this – that they must learn verb tenses to be good at English.
So, he buys my book and starts reading it.
The following week for his second lesson, he shows up with my book in hand. He told me, “You are right. I started reading your book. And the parts of speech are definitely the beginning (foundation) of English grammar.”
English Sentence Structure is the true starting point
I remember back to the time when I was in 2nd grade. The teacher wrote “This is a sentence on the board.” She then wrote the sentence and diagrammed its parts. Of course, I don’t remember what the sentence was, but it looked something like the image below.
This is where we native speakers start our English grammar journey – with a sentence and the parts of speech.
If that is how we learn English, why not learn English sentence grammar like a native speaker?
If you need more encouragement to learn the English parts of speech, don’t just believe me. Teacher Julieta has an informative post on her blog here.
Why Verb Tenses Alone Won’t Fix Your Grammar
For some languages, verb tenses are just the form to express the verb in different time zones. With English, on the other hand, the verb tenses are concepts. The simple, continuous, and perfect tenses each express a concept alongside the verb.
Those concepts are complemented by the adverbial phrases and clauses that modify the verb. Therefore, it is a good idea to understand more about verbs (as a part of speech) and its modifiers before you can fully master the verb tenses.
This is, in part, because time expressions are one of the four main modifiers for verbs. So, learn about verbs, their modifiers, then verb tenses become easier to unlock at the top of the pyramid.
What Is Sentence Structure?
Sentence structure is the collection of main pieces to express a clear thought. In English Grammar Explained, I teach that a sentence expresses “Who doing what.”
- 1. It’s like a very short story where you have the hero – the subject.
- 2. The hero takes an action – the verb.
- 3. The action impacts on someone, something, or somewhere – the object.
- 4. Together, these 3 elements combine to form a sentence.
That sentence can be extended with modifiers. These are things that tell us more about the nouns or the verbs (of the story).
Once you have mastered this basic structure, it clears the way to learn and use the higher concepts – like verb tenses.
Why say “WHO + DOING + WHAT” instead of “Subject + Verb + Object”
This book is designed to meet the needs of non-native English speakers by making complex grammar terms more relatable.
While terms like “subject,” “verb,” and “object” are accurate, I don’t want potential readers like you to feel the language is too academic.
By changing the sentence structure to WHO + DOING + WHAT, I believe the concept becomes more intuitive.
Common Mistakes Solved by understanding the Parts of Speech
The parts of speech have relationships with each other. If you know these relationships and practice them enough, your use of English will be much more accurate.
For instance, many learners make common mistakes that can be fixed easily with a focus on the part-of-speech relationships. Take the determiners “other” and “another.”
Another is actually a combination of the determiner “an” + “other,” meaning “one other.” Therefore, it modifies only singular nouns. I can’t tell you how many times I have had to correct students using “another” + a plural noun.
Examples: Another languages, another people, another countries, etc.
What Are the Parts of Speech?
The parts of speech are the building blocks of every English sentence. Each plays its own role in creating meaning and clarity:
Name people, places, things, or ideas. Examples include: teacher, city, love.
Express the number, definiteness, specificity, or possession of a noun. There are 5 types of determiners including: numbers, articles, demonstratives, possessives, and quantifiers.
Describe or
modify nouns in a number of ways.
Examples:
happy, modern, perfect.
Show actions or states of being. There are many qualities about verbs. These qualities play into how we use them in verb tenses.
Examples: push, hold, know.
Modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs, often describing how, where, when, or why.
Examples: quickly, very, here.
These are just five of the eight parts of speech. You can learn them all in the full post on the 8 Parts of “connected” speech here.
Or, you can just buy my book, English Grammar Explained, and learn them there and in greater detail.
By understanding these roles of the 8 parts of speech, you can construct clear and accurate sentences.
Why Non-Native Learners Miss Out on the Parts of Speech
Back when I started writing English grammar explained, I was motivated to fix my students’ sentence grammar – not verb tenses. I was thinking about how I was going to explain sentence structure and word order.
Then I realized that I needed to start with the parts of speech.
I began polling my students with “Have you ever had a lesson on the 8 parts of speech?” Many of their responses were like the following:
- what’s that?
- No, never.
- What are the parts of speech?
- and so on.
One-by-one, they all responded “no” in some fashion.
Then, I started looking through my collection of English coursebooks. Nothing. Not one of my books even contained a lesson on the 8 parts of speech.
It’s not as if non-native English learners don’t learn each part. They do exercises on adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and pronouns.
However, they (my English coursebooks) rarely have lessons or exercises purely on nouns and verbs, which is criminal.
Also, they don’t differentiate between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions.
No wonder English learners around the world struggle with learning verb tenses!
The Consequences of not Understanding the Parts of Speech and their relationships
Wait a minute, what do verbs and conjunctions have to do with the verb tenses?
At the heart of every verb tense, there is a verb – duh!? Yet, verbs have properties, and those properties affect the verb tense.
- Verbs can express a state in which case it cannot be continuous.
- Verbs can be long or short physical or mental actions. The long actions tend to be continuous while the short actions tend to be simple.
- Yet, short actions can be continuous for two reasons:
- It is interrupted.
- It is repeated a number of times.
- Subordinating conjunctions often dictate what the verb tenses are in one or both of its clauses.
The parts of speech are super important for every English learner and should be your starting point of English grammar. And as you can see, there is a clear connection between the parts of speech, their relationships, and how it affects verb tense grammar. In English Grammar Explained, you will learn all of these things and more!
English Grammar Explained: Your Guide to Mastering Sentence Building
Introducing my pride and joy, English Grammar Explained.
This book is the end product of almost 3 years of writing, late nights, and early mornings. I also need to give a shout to many of my English students for allowing me to test my explanations on them. And now, it can be your grammar guide, putting you on track to English sentence grammar mastery.
What This Book Offers
This book is structured into three parts, each designed to help English learners progress step-by-step:
You will master all aspects of sentence structure and the parts of speech. This section builds the most important knowledge to build out clear and accurate simple sentences.
This first section should make you equivalent to an American 6th grader in terms of grammatical understanding.
Explore simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences. You will learn how complex sentence structures include advanced forms like conditionals and cause-and-effect relationships.
Not only are these higher thinking functions, but they also dictate how verb tenses relate to one another in complex sentences. To put it simply, you cannot master verb tenses without mastering complex sentences.
Finishing part 2 should bring you to an American 8th or 9th grade grammar level.
Develop advanced skills like transformations by understanding how English sentences to work. You will learn that just because a sentence is grammatically correct, that doesn’t make it a clear sentence.
Part 3 of my book will teach you how to connect or link ideas more naturally with advanced techniques.
From Common Mistakes to Confident Communication with English Grammar Explained
Perfecting English grammar isn’t about memorizing verb tenses. it’s about understanding how sentences work. By focusing on sentence structure, you can fix your common mistakes and become more fluent.
With English Grammar Explained as your guide, you’ll do the following:
- gain practical understanding to construct clear, logical sentences.
- build longer and more complex sentences without mistakes.
- know what makes a sentence clear.
more importantly, where the biggest mistakes that make your sentences hard to understand.
Start your journey to confident communication today—because every fluent sentence begins with a solid foundation.
