Parts of Speech

Nouns are words that name something. They can be things that you can see and feel like "apples", or things that are 'abstract' or unable to be touched like ideas or emotions such as "love". Nouns can also be broken down into smaller groups like Proper nouns(e.g., Sydney, McDonalds), as well as common nouns, to name a few.

Adjectives are words that describe or modify nouns. In this way, they classify or specify the nouns.

Verbs are words that either show actions or states. An 'action verb' example is 'eat' whereas a 'stative verb' example is 'know'. The important rule to remember when using stative verbs is that you generally cannot use the continuous tense form, as in 'I am knowing you', which is incorrect.

Adverbs are words that can modify a verb, an adjective, or even another adverb. However, a better term would be 'adverbials' as many include more than one word like a prepositional phrase such as 'at night'. The key thing to remember, when deciding if something is an adverbial, is to ask if it tells you either 'when', 'where', 'how' or 'why'. If it does, it is an adverbial.

Prepositions are function words that, on their own, have little meaning, so you need to think of what they are connected to to make sense of them. One important thing to remember is that a preposition is always followed by a noun or a gerund, and that the phrase that is constructed is an adverbial.

Although adjectives and adverbs can also be grouped under the banner of 'determiners', for a basic meaning, think of the determiners as those words that come before the nouns such as the articles, 'a', 'an' and 'the', as well as quantifiers like 'some', or 'many' and demonstrative adjectives like 'this' or 'these', to name a few.