It's past perfect, or should that be continuous?

After a week of learning all about nouns, verbs, adverbs, propositions, conjunctions, determiners, interjections, and numbers (and that's just the first part of the module!) I am finally nearing the end of module three of my TEFL course. Module three is 'An Introduction to English Grammar', and I had no idea how complex grammar would be to relearn. Of course, I use grammar perfectly everyday, but the rules have been ingrained in my head through years of schooling and study. Add to the mix of education that I am particularly passionate about the English language, interested in it, and enjoy learning about it, I have never had a problem with grammar before. It is one of those things that many native English speakers 'just know'. Of course, we don't  'just know' it, we have learned it continuously throughout our years of study, but relearning it to teach it is something completely different.

The first nearly 60% of the module was taken up with learning 'word classes', which are the different categories a word can fall into. Every single word in the English language will fall into one of the word classes. These classes are listed at the beginning of this post. But, that's not all, within all these classes, there are subclasses! I'll use nouns as the example, a noun will either be proper or common, then it will either be concrete or abstract, and, finally, it will be countable or uncountable. So the noun 'John', for instance, is a proper, concrete, uncountable noun. I could go into what these six subclasses mean, but I have spend a week learning about them and don't feel like going into great detail, if you're interested, check out any reputable grammar book.  So, when I finished that 60%, the next 20% was all about the different types of verbs, yes, verbs. Did you know that verbs come in all shapes and sizes? Well, maybe not quite, but there are auxiliary verbs, main verbs, regular verbs and irregular verbs, on top of that, verbs also come in twelve different tenses (and you thought there were only three): present simple, past simple, future simple, present continuous, past continuous, future continuous, present perfect, past perfect, future perfect, present perfect continuous, past perfect continuous and future perfect continuous. Again, check a grammar book if you're interested. After the verb tenses, I found myself learning all about active and passive voice (which is still all about verbs), there's an example below if you're interested.

When verbs was over, the last 20% of my course was on 'The Function of Tenses' which basically explained that sometimes verbs in the present tense actually could be used in sentences relating to past events etc. Once that was over, I sat down to do my course quiz, only to find out that, for this module, there were three quizzes! Well, actually, there were three parts to one quiz. I passed the first part of the quiz, but I failed the second part (it's alright, I've got unlimited attempts to do it) and not because of mistakes with my grammar, but because I made silly little spelling errors. So, at that point, I decided that I needed to take a break and went to watch a DVD. Honestly, I had no idea grammar could be so tiring!

In other news, I have not heard back from the winery yet about more work, but I'm hoping it's just because they're not too busy. I'm off to look at houseboats with my mum and dad tomorrow morning, and then I'm going to the farmer's market with them to look at local produce. Then I'm volunteering for four hours, then it's home for nachos, and then off to the bookstore. In fact, I think I'm going to have a lovely day tomorrow.

See ya!

~ Australian Kiwi