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Well, N & V are up on the conlang refs thread.
adjectives are words that describe nouns
adverbs are words that describe verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs (that sounds weird at first, I suppose, but for example, he ran very quickly--ran is the verb, very is an adv. describing quickly, which describes ran.
So yeah... I should put this in the refs thread as well

...I live in a state where schools don't teach crap about the English language. One of my roomies last year didn't know any of this either.

Apparently, I went to the ONLY elementary school that taught English grammar. I remember being mortified when a girl behind me in 8th grade English said, "Umm... what's a predicate noun??"

I learned more technical stuff about grammar (cases, names of complicated tenses) in foreign language class, but most of the stuff I already knew.

See, sentence mapping IS good for you!! biggrin

They went to the store.

They/went
..........to|store
.....................|the

So much fun biggrin

Edit: I kept trying to get the to show up for that, but it wouldn't, so I'm using | instead.

I guess they're a little different in Russian... so po-russki would be like speaking "Russianly" rofl

I dunno

Semicolons are for places where it's appropriate to make a new sentence, but it would seem awkward; these are what make my writing seem long and confusing but can also be useful for flow.
My speech teacher (I used to breathe in the middle of my words because I"d run out of air midsentence rofl so they sent me to speech class) basically summed up punctuation this way:
no punctuation: keep going
comma: brief pause for air, just gives a break between ideas without really stopping
semicolon: like a big comma--it's more divisive, but still not a full break from topic
period: pause as long as a semicolon, but it's more likely to completely change teh topic.

I should probably make some easier-to-understand lessons on this somewhere--I know too much of this stuff xd

See that makes sense, and is sort of how I try to write.

I remember in grade 10 my teacher came up to me with the short story I had just handed in. He basically told me to buy a punctuation book because I use too many commas. So now I avoid using commas. XD

How the above would have looked in grade 10:

I remember in grade 10, my teacher came up to me, with the short story I had just handed in, and basically told me to buy a punctuation book, because I use too many commas. So now, I avoid using commas. XD

><

My punctuation sucks, but I don't deny it.

I generally do better when I don't try, if that makes sense.

It's where I get the most marks taken off when I write essays, which I why I went into the sciences. I've yet to see a professor who can spell decently never mind know punctuation.

If I had been homeschooled... eek / burning_eyes

I would've finished grad school already, probably.
English and Literature from my mother, spelling from the sheer amount of books I read anyway, math, science, history, and random stuff from my father.

Foreign language, though... I'd be on my own, but I still probably would've gotten into it much sooner. I also would have developed other conlangs
But kintarasesa wouldn't exist; half hte reason it does is a friend from middle school rofl
She's on this forum now, but hasn't said anything, I don't think.

I know I'm a little late with this, but...

Adverbs are undoubtedly one of the trickier parts of any language.

Even my German professor admitted that one of the main problems for her when learning English was the adverbs. Prepositions bothered her too, but not as much.

I think the best way to describe what an adverb is "something that describes something that isn't a noun".

Also, when I was in regular school (before college, I mean), my English teachers could never accurately describe just WHAT these different sentence-part things were.

I only just realized what a "predicate adjective" is in my German class this semester. I've known it all along, but I didn't know it was called that. I understand most of the basic concepts of language (many foreign ones, too), I just don't know all the terminology.


---One more thing about adverbs, they're not always single words. I learned in German that you can have "adverbs of time" in addition to "adverbs of manner". In German, you might say "Montags gehe ich einkaufen." or "On Mondays I go shopping." How is that an adverb? Well "on Mondays" is an adverbial phrase of time, and you can also think of it as "weekly" or ... "I go shopping weekly" but you're specifying that it's on Mondays that you go shopping... Either way, "weekly" and "On Mondays" are still adverbs of time that modify the verb "go" (in this case, "go shopping"). That's how my professor explained it. I may not be correct. sweatdrop

Does anyone get that? I think I may have rambled a bit.