Start here to learn about adverbs.

Hello and welcome to this section on adverbs.

Generally speaking, adverbs modify verbs in the same way in which adjectives modify nouns.

But adverbs.

don’t just modify verbs - they also modify adjectives and other adverbs.

So in other words, they add information about what is happening.

So this sanction starts off with looking at a common way of making adverbs which is to derive them from their corresponding adjective.

We then carry on looking at adverbs in terms of relative, comparative and superlative adverbs and then we look at adverbs which are used to ask questions - also called interactive adverbs.

The rest of the section is devoted to different types of adverbs and how we use them.

So specifically, what we’ve done is we’ve broken down the adverbs into different sort of functional groups and had one lesson on each group.

So the groups we have are to do with adverbs of certainty, degree, manner, place, time, frequency, viewpoint and opinion.

And then each of these individual lessons, you’ll see some commonly used adverbs of that type that we use in English, we explain when they’re used and how to use them and also give plenty of examples so you can really see what we mean.

Just one word of warning.

Please don’t get to the end of the section I say yay and all about adverbs and charge off and start using adverbs all over the place.

There is a certain style that says overuse of adverbs is a bad thing.

The reason for this is that it

often if you find your over-using adverbs it usually means you can find a better verb.

So I’ll give you a very quick example as this is only the introductory part of the section.

If you were to say for example, “he ran quickly”, and ran is the verb and quickly is the adverb but you could equally instead of saying ran quickly you could use a better verb namely, “he sprinted”.

And in this way you’ve conveyed the same information but you haven’t just used verbs over and over just with different adverbs - you’ve used better verbs.

So just a word of warning: don’t overuse adverbs even though you now know all about them.