hi everyone welcome back to learn academic English I'm Jenna and on this channel I
teach intermediate and advanced level lessons for English Learners who want to take their language
to the next level if you use English for school or work today's lesson is going to be especially
helpful for you today I'm going to talk about Advanced irregular noun plurals so in today's
short lesson I'm going to give you a quiz to see how much you already know about this topic then
I will explain the rules one by one and then at the end of the video we will take the quiz again
to see how much you learned before we get into that please don't forget to give this video a
like leave a comment and subscribe if you find it helpful and know that I offer memberships of
two different levels if you would like more connection and feedback from me every week
so let's get into that little quiz I'm going to show you the singular form of
seven nouns and you're going to see if you know how to make them plural you can pause
the video at any time if you want to write your answers down number one hypothesis
hypothesis
number two memorandum so this is the long form of the word memo that you probably know from work
memorandum number three stimulus stimulus
number four species
species number five dear dear number six curriculum curriculum and number seven Criterion
Criterion okay so at the end of the video we'll take that quiz again and you'll be able to check
your answers then but first let's get into the different rules for advanced irregular noun
plurals first of all you should note that most of these words are longer words that originally
came from Greek or Latin and that's why they have irregular noun plural forms and in formal
situations like in school and work we usually retain that irregular plural form even if it's
a little bit tricky or awkward so the first group that you should know is if the noun ends in i s
to make it plural you change is to ES in other words you don't just add e s to the end of the
word you actually have to change i s t e s for example crisis crises analysis analyzes
thesis feces axis axes parenthesis parentheses okay many of these nouns are usually used either
in the singular or the plural form for example the word thesis is often used when we talk about
writing in school but it's rare for us to say Theses but sometimes it happens another word
is analysis that's usually done in the singular form and the plural form is not very common on the
other hand parentheses usually refers to two marks and those are usually used in the plural form only
let's go to the second group these are words that end in o-n or um and the plural form is that you
drop the o-n or um and you add an a for example datum data okay so this is another example of a
noun that's usually used only in the plural form it's very rare to hear anyone say datum but if you
work in a scientific area like in a laboratory you might hear that word memorandum memoranda
usually we use the short form memo but you can hear both of those also bacterium bacteria
bacteria is also usually used in the plural form but the singular is bacterium phenomenon
phenomena the next group ends in U S and in the plural form we drop us and add I the most common
example is fungus fungi and we use both of those fairly often actually syllabus syllabi this is a
word that I use in my work all the time because on the first day of school I always give my students
a syllabus a syllabus is a kind of packet that's usually in written form that explains the class
information the class policies the schedule all of the important information about the course
and in school you can often hear one syllabus or plural syllabi alumnus alumni and alumnus is
the person who graduated from a particular University or College alumni is the plural
nucleus nuclei so if you study biology or other Sciences you'll probably come across those words
the next group is es or is that changes to ices for example index indices now this is a pretty
formal form it's possible that you might hear indexes in more informal speech but you also
could come across the irregular form as well appendix appendices here the word appendix is
referring to the information that comes at a back of a textbook these are often lists of information
that could be useful to the reader for example in a grammar book The appendices include lists
of irregular verbs a list of comma rules or a list of common conjunctions and the final group
is nouns that have no change the first couple ones are pretty tricky species species so for
this one the singular form ends in an S and it looks like a plural we can say one species
of animal two species of animals so again the singular and plural are exactly the same series
and we have several animal nouns that follow this pattern deer moose Buffalo fish shrimp sheep
okay so now that we know the rules let's go ahead and take that quiz
again and see how you do this time number one hypothesis can you write down the plural form
number two memorandum
number three stimulus number four series
number five deer
number six curriculum
and number seven Criterion okay let's go ahead and check our answers number one hypothesis the plural
is hypotheses notice that we pronounce it with a long e sound hypotheses memorandum the plural
is memoranda number three stimulus so a stimulus is something that could be shown to someone that
makes a person react in a certain way we often use this in scientific experiments or other formal
situations especially in science the plural form is stimuli and notice that we pronounce it with
the I sound at the end stimuli number four species the plural form is the same species
number five deer the plural form is the same deer
number six curriculum curriculum is the material that is taught in an academic course so for
example when I teach my classes I have to follow a curriculum it's a kind of plan of
the material that is taught in a class and the plural form is curricula and finally Criterion
the plural form is criteria this one is usually used in the plural form criteria criteria are
factors that you might consider to help you make a decision so I hope that you learned something
new in this lesson and please let me know if you have questions don't forget to practice
with me you can let me know what your score was on the quiz and I always leave a question
that you can use to practice in the comments I hope to see you back here again soon take care