Grammar Epiphany

Since I've changed my major from TV Production to English Adolescence Education, I feel like I haven't really been learning anything until this semester. Mainly from my two English classes that I'm taking, one of them being the fundamentals of the English language.

My most vivid memories of how I learned about prefixes, suffixes, and what things like adverbs, nouns, adjectives and verbs were was with my friend who's favorite hobby was filling out Mad Libs. We would always take trips to six flags together, and during the long hour car drives, we spent out time solving riddles and deciphering what adjective to use to fill in the blanks. Other than that, my mother used to be an Occupational Therapist, who worked with kids who needed extra help in writing. She bought some "jump start" learning computer games that had vocabulary and grammar exercise, and I remember playing them for hours. They were my least favorite game to play, and it was hard work, but I was determined to master it.

I had the most trouble with the English language when, believe it or not, I was taking Spanish classes. My teacher was surprised to find out that we had not been taught what past tense, present perfect tense, future tense, and so on, were. We had a lot of trouble trying to conjugate the words.

With a lot of effort I remembered when I learned vague things about sentence structure in 7th grade, but of course I forgot everything about it. I remember how to identify parts of sentence structure now, since we looked at the first line of the poem in my English class. Looking at the first line, "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves," it is still possible to identify the sentence structure. In order for a sentence to be a complete independent clause, it needs to have at least a subject and a verb. "Twas" can be read as "It was," describing something that had happened in the past. Seeing this, "brillig" can be defined as an adjective, since it follows "Twas." This can be the past perfect tense because it is describing an action that has already happened, before mentioning another past action. "Slithy" ends with the letter "y," which can define it as an adverb, even though they usually end in "ly."