welcome back to the english danny
channel
i'm dr don and today i'm starting a new
series
expanding your vocabulary using word
[Music]
families
if you've watched some of my other
english danny channel videos
i introduced the idea of a word family
which means a range of words whose
meaning
all comes from the meaning of one root
word when you know the root word meaning
plus a few simple grammatical principles
you understand the meaning of many
related
words that means you know a whole
word family now let me give you an
example
the verb to help means to assist
someone to provide aid to
do something for someone else
can you help me yes i'll help
i helped my mother cook dinner yesterday
okay now this word help
is also the root word for a word
family let's look at some prefixes
and suffixes that are commonly used
to turn this root word into other
useful words you can check out my
english danny channel video
on prefixes and suffixes if you want
more information about how to do this
so first we can add er
to help to make helper which means
a person who helps others
i need a helper in class today
can you be my helper and we can also
turn
help into an adjective by adding
f-u-l to make helpful
now this word describes something which
helps
people i hope this video is helpful for
you
in learning english you were very
helpful in class today thank you
and we can also add l y
to helpful to turn that adjective
into an adverb helpfully
now the word is describing something
which is done
in a helpful way mark
helpfully added his signature to the
list
now we can also add the prefix u
n meaning not to the adjective
helpful to make the adjective unhelpful
meaning something that does not help or
assist
your criticism was unhelpful
yelling at the teacher is unhelpful
we can add another suffix to help
l-e-s-s
meaning to be without something now
we've got the adjective
helpless and it means to be without help
or without any defenses
when the tank ran out of ammunition
ammunition
the soldiers inside were helpless
so from that root word help
we have a word family that includes
helper
helpful helpfully unhelpful
and helpless and in english word
families can often be extended by adding
that root word
to another word to create new
expressions
for example if i take the root word help
and i add the word list help list
a list is a series of words or numbers
we make an expression
help list meaning a list of things to
help
someone accomplish a task new
expressions
in english are often made in just this
way
the word email was created like this
by taking the word electronic and then
the word
mail and putting them together
electronic
mail so we just shorten that word
electronic to the letter e
and so now we have email meaning
electronic mail mail that is sent over
the internet
so this is a very common way that we
have in english of constructing new
expressions today's video is just the
first
entry in a series of vocabulary building
videos
if you keep watching this series i'll
show you a whole bunch of
word families just like today that will
show you
that will give you the power to expand
your english vocabulary
see you in the next video