Irony, puns, and sarcasm are some of the toughest concepts in English. This video attempts to explain all three.
Some nouns look the same whether they're singular or plural – these nouns are called "base plurals", and we'll demonstrate how they behave the only way I know how... by using sheep!
You don't need to know how to speak Latin and Greek in order to understand English, but some words in English come from those languages. It's helpful to know how some Greek and Latin words change from singular to plural.
The plural of "dog" is "dogs", but what is the plural of "leaf"? Khan Academy's resident grammarian explains.
English has seven words that behave very strangely when you change them from the singular to the plural. These are called THE MUTANT PLURALS of English. They're super cool.
The plural of "whale" is "whales", but what's the plural of "child"? David, Khan Academy's resident grammarian, explains.
An introduction to how English uses italics and underlining.
How do you know when to use "less" and "fewer" when describing things?
KA grammarian Paige introduces an important piece of punctuation that helps link items in a sentence: the colon!
In a previous video, we established that one thing verbs can do is show actions, like "the bear runs." Verbs can also link ideas to one another, like "the bear looks cheerful.".
Kim and David discuss the mystery of the "Lost Colony" on Roanoke Island, the English settlement in North America that vanished in the late 1500s. In this video, they set the stage for the colonial venture and discuss the first two missions to Roanoke Island.
Kim and David continue discussing the Lost Colony of Roanoke. What happened when the English colonists finally settled on the coast of North Carolina? What are the prevailing theories about what happened to the colonists?
David and Paige introduce you to the superhero of the punctuation world: the comma!
Prepositions help show us where things are in space and time.
There's a class of helper verbs known as modals that we use to express a bunch of conditions: we can use them to give advice, make guesses at how necessary or likely something is, make requests of people, and so on. They're super useful.
David and Paige, KA’s resident grammarians, discuss tag questions, yes and no statements, and direct address -- all situations where the comma is super useful.
Parallel structure isn’t a set rule, but more of a stylistic choice: it helps sentence elements maintain a pattern. This is a very special episode because it’s Paige’s last video with us as a KA intern! We will miss having Paige as a contributor to the Grammar Team.
Parentheses set off extra information (such as a writer's remarks, an interruption, or a reference) from the rest of a sentence. Learn how to use them in this video!
You use the perfect verb aspect to express when an action is completed, like "I have done the dishes.".
We use the perfect progressive aspect to talk about an action that was once ongoing, but has since completed, like "I had been waiting for twenty minutes.".