Grammar Recapitulation (Part I)

When I initiated this blog, I started with a write up in Hindi, about the state of our Indian School Education. Now I wish to address something related to my subject, i.e.  English

English as medium of instruction destroys self-confidence of non-native speakers as they lack basic ability to reason an alien language. Probable consequence is that they  accept the English word without question. This leads to the deculturation of millions who receive such education. To learn a language, it is not necessary that the language should be the medium. 

To be precise, near complete absence of any emphasis on grammar, writing and composition skills give away your real proficiency level in the given language.

Generally, we, in India start learning the rules of grammar from class 1st and each year children go on studying the same grammar topics further, with more elaborated rules and exercises. It so happens that by the time children come to their main exams, i.e. first board (class 10), they tend to forget the basic grammar and many a times are unable to frame proper sentences and are at loss to know why. So lets recapitulate "English Grammar" from scratch.

Oxford Dictionary says "Grammar is the way in which words are put together to form proper sentences."

In Grammar the first lesson that we learn is the building up of proper sentence with the help of meaningful words. Words are made up of letters. 

Difference between 'Alphabet' and 'Letter' : Alphabet is a collection of letters. A letter is a particular symbol used in writing.

Thus  
        Letter -       "A" 

        Alphabet - "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ "

In this manner there are 26 letters in English Alphabet : a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. 
Five letters are vowels and rest are consonants.

Vowels         - a, e, i, o, u 

Consonants -  b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, z

A word is framed when letters are put together in a proper order that makes sense. eg. 'lpya' is not a word while 'play' is a word.

Similarly, a sentence is framed when words are put together in a proper order that makes sense. Thus, 'good a Ram is boy' is not a sentence, because these group of words do not give any sense. Where as 'Ram is a good boy.' is a sentence because it makes sense.

Kinds of Sentences :

• Declarative 
• Imperative
• Interrogative
• Exclamatory
• Optative 

* Next write up will explain in detail the Kinds of Sentences