If you think that grammar is a difficult to understand, relax. Grammar is easy, and a bit fun too, to learn.

Of course, the technical words that many grammar books use maybe intimidating, but remember that they too are words representing some simple concepts. Take for example, the noun.

You may have never come across the word noun in your everyday speech or writing, and maybe thinking that it is big, difficult word, to be left to the experts to deal with.

Change your opinion. A noun is a name. When a word is used as a name, it is called a noun. Wilson, the name of a person, is a noun. Computer, the name of a gadget with which you work or study or play or amuse yourself, is a noun. And so is your name or the name of the place you come from.

The name of a place, the name of a person, the name of a thing-any name is a noun. It can be the name of an activity or the name of a concept or idea-anything!

What troubles most learners is the word thing as in the definition of noun-name of a person, place or thing. It is a vague word that covers many 'things'. An idea can be a thing, an animal can be a thing, a feeling can be a thing-as we say it is nothing to worry about. Anyway, forget all those things. Just remember, a noun is a name.

Nouns have a certain position in the sentence. You can easily spot a noun because they appear after words such as a, an, the, any, few, a few, little, a little or another set of words such as in, at, by, with and so on.

We shall take a look at these sometime later, in another article. However, what will help you immediately is a good understanding of two types of nouns-count and non-count nouns.

The names of things that are countable are called count nouns. E.g. a car, two cars, many cars, one-hundred and twenty cars. The names of things that are not countable are non-count nouns. Water is non-count noun. So you do not have one water, two waters or several waters.

Do you understand now why we do not use a or an with non-count nouns? You do. And now you will find learning grammar easy and fun because you understand.
More of this in the next post.

ganeshan ramachandran