名词简介

hello grammarians welcome to the English parts of speech we're gonna begin with the noun the lovely wonderful noun your friend and mine they're mostly what you're going to encounter in sentences most sentences in English contain at least one noun or a pronoun but we'll get to pronouns later a noun is basically anything and I know that's not an especially helpful definition but we'll get more more specific in a minute and that is basically anything at all now the way this is taught in traditional grammar is to say that a noun is a person place or thing which is fine I think we can make that a little bit sharper and expand that out by saying that they are that nouns are people or living things places things or ideas I think ideas is the one that usually gets left out so nouns can be people places things and ideas let's put that in action so this is Raul he is from Argentina he is a penguin Raul has big dreams now okay so I want to take these three sentences and find the nouns in them using the test so the test is is that a person or a living thing a place a thing or an idea and if it's any of those things then it falls into the category of words in English which we call nouns so sentence number one this is Raul what is Raul well Raul is a person or a living thing so we're just gonna say person so next sentence he is from Argentina now Argentina happens to be a place so therefore it is also a noun so kind of noun called the proper noun just like Raul is but we'll get to that later so Argentina is a noun Argentina incidentally a country and the word country is also a noun because it is a thing so since the third he is a penguin now penguin is a living living being or a thing so we can say oh yes penguin that is a noun as well so you've noticed I'm not circling he or this these words are our pronouns or relative pronouns and they're they can sometimes behave like nouns but I wouldn't I wouldn't call them nouns that'll just get confusing so these are these are pronouns and we'll get to them later sentence number four Raul has big dreams so here we have Raul again we know from the first sentence that it's a person's name so we're just gonna say this is also a noun again and dreams now a dream isn't a person a place it's not it's it's a thing sure the reason I put in idea as a fourth category is to get it stuff that you can you can't pick up like for example the war so dream yes dream is a noun dream is maybe a little tangible cuz it's something you can imagine but the idea of like we're like bigness or if you prefer you know size the the size of Raul's plumage was astonishing look at that gorgeous plumage well penguin Mohawk the size of Raul's plumage was astounding now in that sentence size is a noun but it's not it's not it's not a physical thing it's not a person it's not a place it's not something you can pick up it's an idea so that's why I include this fourth category so if you're trying to figure out whether or not a word is a noun just apply this test ask yourself is it a person a place a thing or an idea and you my friend will be golden you can learn anything David out