Questions About English Answered (Intermediate)-7

Hello and welcome to Private English Portals Peppy questions of the week. My name is Steve and this week we have an emailed question from Juan Carlos. I hope I am pronouncing that correctly, Juan Carlos from Mexico. And Juan’s question is about intermediate English. He says he is studying Intermediate English and he would like to know what the differences between short adjectives and long adjectives.

That is a very good question Juan and what I can tell you is what I tell all my students that a short adjective typically, okay, has two syllables. So for you to know how many syllables, you can always clap your hands as you say the adjective. So, let us take the adjective for example Happy. So if we say happy right I clap my hand twice that means it has two syllables, okay. Two syllables or last. Juan that would be considered a short adjective. Typically, there is always an exception that is not my fault. And a long adjective would be for example, one that has three syllables, three claps of the hand as I am saying the word or more. So if we take for example the adjective fantastic, right. Fantastic, that is three claps of a hand, three syllables. So an adjective, a long adjective is a word like an adjective, which has three sounds, three syllables or more.

Now of course there are always exceptions and this is why they say it is a short adjective or a long adjective because sometimes, there is an adjective which escapes the rule. Now we use short adjectives and long adjectives, for example happier, right happy happier, fantastic, more fantastic. But there are some exceptions for example, friendly, how many has syllables this friendly have. Friendly has two, but in the comparative, we say more friendly. Or we could say friendlier. We can say both that is an exceptions okay. And it gives a bit of an explanation to why we say short adjectives, long adjectives instead of saying two syllables or less or three syllables or more.

So I hope that answers your question. I could go on a lot more about that topic but that something that we can do in class online. So thank you for your question and I look forward to the next peppy question next week. Bye-bye.


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