Hi and welcome to the Espresso English Podcast, where you can improve your English in just a few minutes a day.
My name is Shaina and I'm the teacher at Espresso English.
Make sure to visit the website EspressoEnglishnet, where you can get online courses and e-books that will help you learn English even faster.
Let's get started with today's lesson.
Pop quiz!
Which is correct?
A red big ball or a big red ball?
An awful old movie or an old awful movie?
A French lovely silk gown or a silk French lovely gown or a lovely French silk gown?
All of these examples are related to the order of adjectives in English.
When we have multiple words describing something, how do we know which one comes first, next and last?
That's exactly what you're going to learn today.
And if you can master the correct adjective order, then you'll be able to describe anything with confidence in English, knowing you sound natural.
Make sure to download the free PDF of this lesson.
It's a fantastic reference because it has lots of example words as well as a quiz to help you practice the proper order of adjectives.
Click on the link in the description and enter your email address to get that free PDF delivered to your inbox.
Let's get right to it.
In general, the correct order of adjectives in English is this opinion size age shape color origin material, purpose and then the noun.
Let's go through each category with examples.
Opinion adjectives describe what you think of it.
Words like beautiful lovely ugly awful wonderful strange boring charming, delightful and annoying.
Size adjectives tell us how big or small the thing is.
Words like big, small, tiny, huge, enormous, little, gigantic, short, tall, and massive.
Age adjectives tell us how old something is.
So we have old, new, young, ancient, modern, teenage, elderly, recent, middle-aged, centuries old.
Shape adjectives describe the shape or form.
It could be round, square, flat, narrow, long, wide, triangular, oval, rectangular, or cylindrical.
Color adjectives obviously are words like red blue green yellow black white pink brown gray orange, and we can add an additional word before it to describe the tone, like light or pale, yellow or dark blue.
Origin adjectives tell us where it's from, like American French Japanese Brazilian German Indian Italian Chinese, Egyptian and Spanish.
Note that these words, these country adjectives, are always capitalized.
Material adjectives tell us what it's made of.
Words like wooden, metal, plastic, glass, cotton, silk, leather, wool, ceramic, and stone.
Purpose adjectives tell us what it's used for and they almost always end in "-ing".
Words like dining writing cooking sleeping running gardening shopping walking, reading and training.
So we have things like a frying pan or a sleeping bag.
Now, no, it's very rare to use more than three adjectives at a time.
So although I could say this is a useful big new square gray American plastic storage box, nobody would actually say all of that.
It's unnatural.
It's more common to use just two or three adjectives and they should follow the order.
For example with two adjectives a young Japanese artist, a small oval window, interesting purple flower.
Let's look at some with three.
A comfortable new leather couch.
A tiny red Italian car.
A round wooden dining table.
And I've got a couple with four adjectives.
A lovely Old ceramic coffee mug.
A beautiful tiny round blue jewel.
Now, there are other adjectives that don't quite fall into those categories.
For these, the essential rule to remember is that opinion adjectives always come before fact adjectives.
That would be appearance and other descriptive adjectives.
So we have delicious, that's your opinion, organic, that's the fact, food.
Delicious organic food.
Crazy religious people.
Interesting cultural traditions. confusing financial data.
Let me give you one final tip for learning the correct order of adjectives.
Although studying and practicing them can help, there reaches a point where you'll learn them best simply by seeing and hearing them in action.
In fact, most native English speakers don't know the rules of adjective order at all.
We just know that it sounds right to say the big red ball and it sounds wrong to say the red big ball.
So as you read and listen to more English, you'll eventually begin to order the adjectives, naturally.
Think you've got it time to test yourself with a quiz.
You'll find that quiz inside the free pdf which you can get by clicking on the link in the video description.
If you want to master english grammar, i'd love to help you inside my advanced grammar course, where we learn all these tricky topics in detail, with clear explanations and examples.
Click on the link under this video to learn more about the advanced grammar course and sign up.
I hope to see you in there.
That's all for today.
Talk to you next time.
Keep practicing your English and I hope you have a wonderful day.
