http://www.engvid.com/ Do you always know which words are verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs? If not, this grammar lesson on suffixes, or word endings, will help you. I'll also teach you the 3 most useful word endings that will make learning English much easier. Take a quiz on this lesson here: http://www.engvid.com/english-grammar-suffixes/

Teacher favorites. What should we do now? Hi. James, from EngVid. Looking for classroom stuff because you know we have so much here for you. But before I forget, I can't do my job without my favorite pal in the world, Mr. E. And this lesson today, actually, guys, it's sort of a lesson that we did before, and it's a second part. I didn't say it was a second part, but it is. You'll go back -- if you go to EngVid, you can see the lesson on prefixes, which funny enough, is the beginning of the word, and this is the end of the word, which are called "suffixes".

Let's start from the beginning. What are suffixes? Let's go to the board. A suffix: "suf" means -- this part of the word here actually means "under". It means "under" or "lower". Why? When we did prefixes, prefixes meant "before", which meant you put two, three, or five letters in front of a word. And that actually changed the meaning of the word if you remember. If we did "do" and "redo", they're not the same meaning. "Do" -- one time, "redo" means "start again".

When we do suffixes, a suffix goes on the end of the word. And I'm going to try to explain to you by going here first. Grammar suffixes. You've seen these before. S, ED, and ING. When we have S -- you know if you see a pronoun ending in S, like -- sorry. A verb, I should say. "She is", "he goes" -- you know by seeing the S on the end of that verb that that verb is taking on a third person singular. In other words, it's talking about a person we don't know, right? And it's a singular person. So that's the grammar suffix, one letter added on. When you see ED on the end of the word, you know that that means this verb is in the past. "I watch TV all the time." "I watched television last night." "I stopped my car in front of the house." This is something that happened in the past, not now. When we have the third ending you're familiar with, ING, they're used for gerunds. And you know the gerund has three uses: It's either a present participle -- working, talking, singing; an adjective -- a climbing tree or a swimming pool; or just a noun -- cooking. Yeah, I know. All end in ING, but they have three different functions.

Well, these are examples of suffixes -- letters at the end of the word that change the class or the verb function, you might say, or the grammar function. But it doesn't actually change the meaning of the word. "Swim", "swimming" -- similar. Okay?
Now, how do I explain this? Well, when we do this, we do the same thing here, which is grammar, specifically, but now, we can change the word class. What I mean is going from -- this is just changing a verb. We're actually going to change the class from, maybe, a noun to an adjective or an adverb, okay? With me so far? It's easy. We're going to add a few letters at the end of the word, and it will change what type of word it is. Is it a noun? Is it a verb? Is it an adverb? Is it an adjective? That's it. And by doing these -- adding some of these, that's how we do it in English. Excuse me. So let's take a look.

These are the top three that you'll find in English. On the last video, at the end of the video, I told you, like, we don't use these for 95 percent, so I'll fix this now. These are the most common, and what I mean by "common" is "most useful for you." There are many other suffixes. But these are most useful for you to kind of figure out or understand words that you'll see because this will tell you what's, basically, the meaning. So I'm going to help you with what the meaning is and how it changes it. So you can look at words and kind of go, "Okay, this must be a noun because I see this ending. Or this must be an adjective." Sound cool? Let's go to the board.

Mr. E, help me with the class. It's a joke. See, you're the class now and "word class". Anyway. The first one we're going to look at is MENT, m-e-n-t. "Government", "improvement", all right? When we add MENT to the end of a word, it's used to make nouns. So what you'll see is this added to a word becomes a noun. And what does it mean? Well, it means an action or process. Okay? So we talk about government, you think, "Okay, now, it's the people, like the president -- President Obama, President Reagan, Prime Minister Harper." Yeah, I like him. Anyway. Sorry. It's a process. So we talk about government is helping the people. That's what they do when they govern. When we put MENT in, we talk about the institution or the group of people that help the People. Cool? So "governing" the verb means to help the People; "government" is the group of people or institution of people that help the People. That's one example.