Writing English for Absolute Beginners Part I: Making Sentences
I get many questions from beginner learners of English about sentence structure and writing sentences. English word order and sentence formations aren’t complicated, but if your native language doesn’t have any Germanic roots, creating English sentences could be difficult.
For beginners, I will explain building sentences like you are building with Lego, and you can practice writing sentences by comparing them to building with Lego bricks. In Part I, I’m going to cover two basic English sentence structures:
- subject + verb + objects + additional information
- subject + verb + additional information
Language as Lego
When we form sentences, we take pieces from our buckets with Lego bricks and put the parts together. Longer sentences consist of more bricks than shorter sentences. We need to take words from different buckets for each part of the sentence.
Structure 1 has four parts: a subject part, a verb part, an objects part, and a part that covers additional information like the place and time in which something takes place.
The SUBJECT and VERB
The subject of a sentence is the person or thing doing something in the sentence. Subjects usually are the first thing to put in a sentence and are always right before the verb.
To form a subject part of a sentence, we need to take words from the noun bucket. Nouns are the names of things, people, and places (like house, Mr Henriquez, and England). The subject is the person who does the action in a sentence. The action is called the verb.
We can create a sentence by combining a noun as a subject together with any verb. Let’s take woman as a noun and sing as a verb. We can create the sentence: “Woman sing.” As you can imagine, this sentence doesn’t sound like a real sentence yet, and we need to add more parts to this to make it a complete sentence.
The first thing we need to do is add something to the noun “woman” because a noun cannot be a subject when it’s alone. It needs an article. We can choose one of three words from the article bucket of Legos: the, a, and an. When we talk about a specific woman, we can use the. When we talk about a woman in general, we use a. In our case, we are going to choose the. Our sentence then becomes:
“The woman sings.”
OBJECTS are the results
In my examples, we know that when you sing, you usually sing a song (there’s nothing else you can sing). So our object, or the result of the action, is the word song, which we can also choose from the noun bucket. Just as we did with the word woman in the subject of our sentence, our object also needs an article. We can again choose from a, an and the. Because I don’t want to talk about a specific song, I’m going to choose article a. Our sentence then becomes: “The woman sings a song.”
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION to make it interesting.
I now want to say where and when the woman sang her song. I need to add a place and a time to our sentence, and they appear in that order. To keep it simple, I’m going to say that I have a bucket for place information and a bucket for time information. So, I’m going to add in the studio for the place and at 19:00 as the time. Our sentence then becomes: “The woman sings a song in the studio at 19:00.”
Nouns and Pronouns
We can also say that we don’t want to use an article + noun in our subject, but we want to use one word that carries the same meaning. In that case, we can use a personal pronoun. We can choose from “I, you, he/she/it, we, you, they”. Obviously, we choose she for the woman, and we can make our sentence into: “She sings a song in the studio at 19.00”.
Note: because The woman is the same as she, we need to add an extra -s to the verb. This is called subject-verb agreement. We do this because we want to show that She and The woman are only one thing/person, or singular. This happens to all the verbs that have a present element. And one exception. More on the verbs below.
What if we don’t want an object?
Sentences almost always need subjects and verbs. There are a few cases where you can leave out the subject, but those are difficult, and we will forget about that for a second.
However, we can leave the object out more often. We usually do this with a particular set of verbs we can take from our verb bucket. I’ll give you an example to illustrate this:
“My name is Mr Henriquez.”
In this sentence, we have a subject (My name) and a verb (is, which comes from the verb to be [I am, you are, he/she/it is]). But what is Mr Henriquez? Yes, it is my name, but what part is it in this sentence? It is not an object; it is additional information. Is connects the subject and the additional information together. We call these types of verbs linking verbs or copula verbs.
The most common linking verbs are to be, to feel, to seem, to smell, and to become, and their function is to link the subject and the additional information if the additional information says something or describes the subject. This is also the case for “My name is Mr Henriquez” because Mr Henriquez is my name. Take the sentence: “The food smells great.” In this sentence, the verb smell connects the subject The food with the additional information great.
Note: we add an extra -s to the verb because The food is the same as It and because the food is singular.
Some extra examples without objects
Here are some extra examples of sentences without objects. You can use these when you’re trying to introduce yourself.
- My name is James.
- I am 30 years old.
- I live in London.
- I am from Germany. (here, we need to add from to indicate that I travelled from Germany to London; I was born there, but I am not there anymore).
Adding more information without adding more information
We can change the meaning of a sentence without adding more information. We could, for example, indicate that something will happen in the past or the future without actually adding extra words. We can do this by modifying (or changing) the verb. We change the verb’s tense and form. The tense can be changed into the present tense, past tense or future tense. The form can be changed into a simple, continuous, perfect, and perfect continuous form.
I am only going to use three verb tenses to illustrate what these verb tenses can do. Let’s take my example from before: “She sings a song in the studio at 19:00.” The verb tense used in this verb — sings — is present simple tense (more on present simple here). A native speaker would read this sentence as if it’s a matter of fact: something that’s a truth and that happens all the time or scheduled (maybe she comes down to the studio every day to sing a song. Who knows?!).
What if I want to say that she did this yesterday? In this case, I need to change the verb from present simple to past simple, and the sentence becomes: “She sang a song in the studio at 19:00”. By making this change, I can change add extra information to the sentence — that it happened in the past — without adding extra information to the sentence.
Finally, if I want to say that she is doing it now, and we’re looking at her singing her song in the studio, I want to change the verb tense to present continuous: “She is singing a song in the studio now.” I also changed at 19:00 to now to illustrate my example.
Another one: the adjectives
Another thing we could do is add information to nouns by adding adjectives. Adjectives are words that say something about nouns. If I want to say something about the song she sang, I add the adjective beautiful to the noun song: “She sang a beautiful song in the studio at 19:00.”
We can add adjectives to the subject of a sentence and to the object of a sentence. If the additional information has a noun, we can even add adjectives to those (as in: “She lives in a large ugly house.”) [The noun is underlined, and the adjectives are in italics].
Summary
In this lengthy article, I described two basic structures of English sentences:
- Subject > Verb > Object > Additional Information
- Subject > Verb > Additional Information
I also explained that we use nouns and articles to form subjects and objects and that we can add adjectives to nouns to give more information about those nouns.
Finally, I mentioned that we can add information about when something took place by changing the verb tense.
Comment some of your own sentences you’ve made following one of these structures!
