MiniPod: Nouns | Bad English Made Better

A school of fish is a collective noun that refers to a specific group of things, animals, or people, all with a singular form. Credit: Georgette Douwma/Getty Images

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Learn about nouns and how to use measure words to count them. The 'Bad English Made Better' minipods are short and simple English grammar lessons.

Learning Highlights:

There are more than ten different kinds of nouns but we will focus on countable and uncountable nouns.
A measure word allows us a way to measure uncountable nouns.
This lesson is designed for intermediate (or medium) level learners.

Transcript:

(Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.)

This show was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung people of the Kulin nation.

SBS acknowledges the traditional owners and pays our respects to the elders past, present and emerging.

Hi everyone… and welcome to the BAD ENGLISH MADE BETTER podcast.

We’re the little sister to a fun-filled SBS Audio series called BAD ENGLISH, where we invite guests to share their English learning journey, and we discover things about the language we didn’t know.

So, who am I, I hear you ask?

I’m Ai-Lin. I’m an English teacher, and I’ll be guiding you through a different lesson each episode to help us make BAD ENGLISH BETTER.

This show, though, is for intermediate (or medium) level learners.

EPISODE 5: NOUNS

One thing about English: it has a lotta, lotta words. The experts say more than a million.

People who grow up speaking English know around 45,000 words. But don’t be put off; let’s break it down and start with the basic building blocks.

Nouns.

There are more nouns than any other kind of word. It's probably because they essentially name things. Actual things like… a computer, a tree, cornflakes.

There are so many nouns that we’ve had to put them into categories. There are actually more than ten different kinds.

You don’t have to remember these, but they include: 

Abstract Nouns
Concrete Nouns
Proper Nouns
Common Nouns
Countable Nouns
Uncountable Nouns
Collective Nouns
Compound Nouns

There’s not enough time to go through all of them in one podcast episode, so let’s focus on the more important ones, starting with Countable Nouns.

Like you can guess from their name, these are nouns which can be counted, such as bananas – one banana, two bananas, ten bananas. So, they can be singular or plural.

Uncountable Nouns are also exactly that… the ones that cannot be counted. Things like salt, air, water.

Generally, how it goes is that uncountable nouns don’t have a plural form. So we don’t say salts, airs, waters…

That sound simple enough?

But we need to quantify or measure things when we use nouns in our lives. We need to know “how much”. That’s easy for countable nouns; we can count them… but what about uncountable nouns?

Well, let me introduce another concept to help… they’re called Measure words.

A measure word allows us a way to measure uncountable nouns.

For example:

With salt – we can have a pinch of salt, a teaspoon of salt, a bag of salt, a kilo of salt.

So, why don’t we do a little test to see what measure words you know?

Listen up, and I’ll say a noun… you see how many measure words you can use to describe this noun.

Okay, here we go… Water

Did you get any of these?

a drop of water
a glass of water
a bottle of water
a litre of water
a jug of water

Be careful, because of course, this is English, every rule has its exceptions. So, guess what… some nouns can be countable and uncountable.

Take the noun “chicken”. It can be countable, as in:

They keep ten chickens in the backyard.

Or, if we use the noun to describe the type of food, it becomes uncountable… as in:

I had chicken for dinner.

What about the noun “hair”? If we talk about hair generally, it's uncountable.

My girlfriend has lots of thick, wavy brown hair.

Or countable if we talk about individual hairs, like, for instance:

I admit I have three or four grey hairs.

And, there are other clever things we can do with nouns. Because, while we like to measure them, we also like to group them.

Let me introduce to you the idea of Collective Nouns.

Collective nouns refer to a group of specific things, animals or people with a singular form.

Let’s get to some examples, and you’ll see what I mean.

Collective nouns can be words such as family, class, team, or army… which all refer to groups of people.

But there are also Collective nouns for animals and things. Have you heard of these?

a flock of birds
a school of fish
a bunch of flowers

Okay, time for our guessing game again.

What do we use for these nouns? Can you guess?

Bees?

Time’s up. Gold star if you got “a swarm of bees”

Kittens?

That’s it… “a litter of kittens”

You might not need to use Collective nouns like this every day, but I think you’ll agree they are interesting… there are so many unusual ones that I find myself learning new ones all the time.

Here are some collective nouns for animals. I wonder if you’ve heard of these…