Learn English: Verb Conjugation
Conjugation is widely regarded as one of the biggest hurdles for a beginning student of foreign language despite the fact that people use it daily without thinking. Literally, conjugation means “to join”; for our purposes, conjugation means “joining the subject and verb.” After writing Learn French: Lesson 2, I realized that a general article on conjugation would serve a student far better than a snippet here and there.
Conjugation in English
As most of my readers are familiar with the English language, I will use English verbs to demonstrate conjugation. For this, I feel that it is necessary to back up and diagram a sentence; this ensures that everyone is on the same level of understanding basic parts of English grammar. Consider the following sentence:
I like books.
That is a very simple sentence; let’s break this down into the basics:
- I
- like
- books.
- Subject
- Verb
- Noun
As you can see, that sentence contains the verb “to like”; “to like” is called the infinitive form of the verb; when conjugating the verb, the word “to” is dropped and the second word “like” is changed to match the subject. Here’s a table of all possible present tense conjugations of “to like”:
- I like
- You like
- He likes
- We like
- You-all like
- They like
It is clear from the example above that the verb “to like” only changes when the subject is “he”. Now we will examine another verb: “to be”. In English we use use the verb “to be” to describe the state of nouns. For example, in the sentence, “The table is brown”, the verb “to be” is conjugated to the form “is”. Let’s examine all possible forms of “to be”:
- I am
- You are
- He is
- We are
- You-all are
- They are
That probably looks awfully familiar; we tend to conjugate “to be” without even thinking that we have done so. As you can see, conjugation is not so difficult when we put it in terms of English. Some languages do have forms we are not used to, such as a differing plural ‘You’ form, but once you realize that subject-verb agreement is the same in many other languages then things become less daunting.
Beyond the Basics
What I’ve covered here is admittedly basic when it comes to conjugation; if you feel unsure after reading this then please comment and I will gladly help in any way possible. That being said, I did not explain tenses or modes or how they affect conjugation because this differs greatly between languages.
Tags: Learn English