Hi there and welcome back to our series of lessons on the parts of speech
My name is Ganesh and this lesson is all about nouns. In this lesson we will
learn about the different kinds of nouns there are in English and we will also
look at some rules to keep in mind when using them. We will first talk about
concrete and abstract nouns, then we'll look at common and proper nouns
which are a very important area. Then we'll discuss the very interesting
collective nouns and finally we'll turn to the most important topic relating to
nouns, and that is countable and uncountable nouns. Before we start just
remember - for any questions let me know in the comments section below and I'll
talk to you there.
OK so first of all what is a noun? I'm sure you know the answer to this -
A noun is just the name of a person, place, animal, thing, feeling or idea. For
example in this sentence "Graham likes to go to the zoo and see the animals." Here
there are three nouns - can you identify all of them? The nouns are Graham - a
person, zoo - a place and animals. Nouns can also be things like watch, T-shirt etc.
And all of these - people, places, animals and things are physical - that means we
can see them and we can touch them. So they are called concrete nouns - that
means they have a real physical existence. So what are abstract nouns?
Abstract nouns are nouns that don't have physical existence. That means we
cannot touch them or see them, and these are ideas and feelings. Now in this
sentence
"Honesty is the best policy." It's a very popular proverb in English
Have you heard of that? In that sentence
honesty and policy are both nouns but they are abstract nouns. And this next
example
"Love is a powerful emotion." Love is the name of a feeling like anger, happiness
or sorrow. And love is a noun. Emotion is also a noun.
OK let's now talk about common and proper nouns.
Do you know what common and proper nouns are? A common noun is a general noun and a
proper noun is the name given to a specific individual. For example in this
chart all the nouns on the left are common nouns and all the nouns on the
right are proper nouns. For example man is a common noun because it can mean any man
but Ganesh is the name of one man - one individual, which in this case is me of
course.
So Ganesh is a proper noun. Woman, in the same way, is a common noun - it could be any
woman but Allison is the name of an individual, so a proper noun. In the next
two, city and country are common nouns but Hamburg and China are the names of one
city and one country, so proper nouns.
OK now let me ask you a question at this point - do you notice something about the
proper nouns? You should be noticing that they're all written with a capital first
letter. And that is actually a rule in English - proper nouns are always written
with a capital first letter. With university, for example, when we talk
about universities in general we use it as a common noun so the whole word is
written in lower case - that means in small letters. But when we're talking
about a specific university like the University of Chicago, notice that both
the 'U' in University and the 'C' in Chicago are capitals.
That's because it's
a proper noun that refers to one specific university. OK there are more
examples on the screen but I want you to focus on the last two - day and month. With
the days of the week - Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,
Saturday, we always write them with the first letter capitalized because they
are proper nouns. And it's the same thing for months as well. From January to
December all months are written with a capital first letter, so please don't
forget this rule - proper nouns are always capitalized or always written with the
first letter capitalized.
OK let's now turn to the really interesting collective nouns. Collective
means something like collection and a collective noun is the name given to a
group of people - animals, places or things. I say that these are interesting because
there are a lot of collective nouns in English and they can be very interesting
to learn.
Let's look at some common examples - a group of players is called a team. Team
is a collective noun and it means a group of players, or it could even mean a group of
workers in a company. Actually there's another word for a group of workers or
employees - can you guess that word? That word is staff. In the same way on the
screen I have some more examples but I want you to guess the collective nouns
before I show them to you.
What do we call a group of students? A group of students is a class.
What about
a group of criminals? A gang A group of soldiers is an army.
What about a group of onlookers? Onlookers means - let's say there has been
an accident on the road - like there's been a car crash. Onlookers are the
people that stand around the scene and they want to see what's happening.
So what do you you call a group of onlookers? We call them a crowd.
Did you get that one? There are also collective nouns for animals. For example
a group of wolves is called a pack. And wolves are very dangerous when they're
in a pack. A group of bees is called a swarm. If you ever see a swarm of bees
coming towards you please run because they can sting really hard and it hurts
very, very bad.
Alright there are also collective nouns for things - like if I have five or
six keys in my hand
do you know what we call that? We call it a bunch of keys.
What about two shoes? A pair. And when there are stairs that you have to take
from one floor of a building to the next floor
do you know what we call that? It's called a flight of stairs. OK so like I
said these can be really interesting but there's one problem - collective nouns can
be difficult because there are so many of them. So what can you do?
Well there are two things that you can do - first
you can learn the most common collective nouns. The examples that I just showed
you are some very common collective nouns.
So if you learn the most common ones then you can use them fluently in
conversation but sometimes you might be in a situation where you want to use a
collective noun but you don't know it or you cannot remember it.
Like, let's say you want to say a gang of criminals but you cannot remember that
word - gang.
So what can you do? You can just use a word like group - a group of criminals - and
your meaning will be clear. Or you can say a bunch of things - the word bunch is
a common collective noun - like a bunch of bananas, for example. So these kinds of
expressions - common collective nouns and even quantity expressions like a lot of,
some etc. If you use them your meaning will be clear. But one reason to learn
collective nouns is that if you use the correct collective noun in a situation
it will make your speech sound stylish, so try to learn as many as you can.
Alright let's now move on and talk about the most important area relating to
nouns and that is countable and uncountable nouns. That's why I've underlined them
in red because they're so important.
Do you know the meaning of countable nouns? A countable noun is a noun that can be
counted and an uncountable noun cannot be counted. Some common countable nouns are are
book, pen, man, spoon, building, elephant etc. With all of these we can use numbers
or plurals to talk about them. We can say two books, five pens, three buildings
etc. If there's only one, we can use a or an - I have a book, there's an elephant
standing over there etc. But uncountable nouns are nouns like water, coffee, air,
salt, sugar, love, advice and so on.
And just by seeing them you should be able to say there's no way to count them
because water and coffee are liquids. Air is a gas. Salt and sugar are so small
that if you try to count the individual particles that would be an extremely
difficult task. And love and advice are abstract nouns because they're feelings
and ideas. Most abstract nouns are uncountable. So with uncountable nouns we
cannot use plurals and we cannot use a and an - that is very important. But we
can use units to talk about quantity. For example we can say a glass of water or
two glasses of water, six tablespoons of sugar or a cup of coffee,
5 cups of coffee and so on. Or we can use units of volume or weight like pounds,
kilograms, ounces and liters. This is how we talk about the quantity of
uncountable nouns. To ask questions we use the expression "How many...?" with
countable nouns like "How many computers do you have in your office?" And with
uncountable nouns we use "How much...?" "How much water is there in the bottle?" or "How
much sugar is there in the jar?" Now with any of these questions if you know the
exact answer you can give it - you can say "There are 20 computers in my office."
"There's half a liter of water." "There's four pounds of sugar in the jar." But what
about if you don't know the exact number or quantity? In that case you can use
quantity expressions with countable nouns - we use a 'few' to mean a small
number. I can say "Oh there are only a few computers in my office."
I don't know the exact number but it's a small number. Or I can say "There's only a
little water in the jar." So with uncountable
nouns we use 'a little' - this is very important. And what about to talk
about a big number or a big quantity? Can you tell me what we use with countable
nouns? We use 'many' or 'a lot of'. "There are many computers in my office." Or "There are
a lot of computers in my office." With uncountable nouns we can use 'much' but
that's less common.
It's more common once again to use 'a lot of' like "There is a lot of coffee in the
cup." So notice that 'a lot' can be used both with countable and uncountable
nouns. In the same way the word 'some' can also be used with both types. For example
"Some computers in my office
don't work." That's some number but I don't want to say the number or I don't know
the number. In the same way we can say "There's some tea left in the glass" - some
tea is some quantity but I don't know the quantity. So with both countable and
uncountable nouns we can use 'a lot of' and 'some.'
OK now I want to tell you about an area where a lot of students make mistakes, so
pay close attention. And this is when we want to make comparisons. We're going to
take a couple of examples - let's say that in my neighborhood, that is in the place
where I live, there are five buildings. In your neighborhood
there are 10 buildings. So we can say that there are more buildings in your
neighborhood.
OK just keep that in mind. And let's take another example - this time
uncountable nouns. I drink two cups of coffee a day but you drink four cups of
coffee a day, so you drink more coffee.
OK so far so good. But what about the opposite? We
say that I drink less coffee. Alright back to our first example, we said there
are more buildings your neighborhood. That means in my neighborhood there are
fewer buildings.
This is where a lot of people go wrong - people say there are less buildings in
my neighborhood. That is grammatically incorrect because with countable nouns
you cannot use less, you have to use fewer to compare.
OK so remember these rules and remember not to make the common mistakes that we
discussed here.
Alright let's do a quick recap of what we've learned today. We started with
concrete and abstract nouns. Remember that concrete nouns have a physical
existence and abstract nouns are ideas and feelings which we cannot touch or
see. Then we spoke about common and proper nouns - what is the important rule
with proper nouns? You always capitalize the first letter. Then we turned to
collective nouns. Remember to learn as many collective nouns as you can because
that will help you to speak with more style. And finally we looked at countable
and uncountable nouns - we discussed a number of rules. Remember the most common
mistake is using 'less' with countable nouns - it's wrong.
'Less' is used with uncountable nouns. 'Fewer' is used with countable nouns.
Alright so that brings us to the end of this lesson. I hope you enjoyed it.
Remember to subscribe to this channel and I will see you in the next lesson.