Indefinite pronouns help

[sallysillybilly]

I'm crap at English so please forgive me. My son has waltzed in with home work asking for the indefinite pronouns in each sentence... I have no clue

•anyone can come
•he had some left
•I saw each person get a sweet
• there was nothing for me to do
• some will happen

Could someone help me 😩

https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/english-grammar-reference/indefinite-pronouns

Anyone
some
each
nothing
some

That's fantastic- I understand now, i appreciate your help xxx

goodness, I have made it to 60 and have never needed to know that - what a stupid waste of time

They are words like 'something', 'anything','anyone' etc - i.e. words which represent an unspecified thing or person. In my opinion (as a languages teacher), the 3rd one doesn't have an indefinite pronoun in it at all. I'm presuming they mean 'each person', but that's a noun preceded by sn adjective. Primary school, I presume? Quite a lot of primary school teachers really don't know very much about grammar.

Some will happen?
Have you transcribed that correctly?
Surely it's "something" will happen?

Yes sorry, it was something * sorry, im so bad at English.

Now im stuck on adverbs an adjectives 😩
I get that they are both descriptive words but I find it hard to decipher.

•he jumped high over fence
• the fence was high

Like omg why am I thick

I know!!! That's what I'm
Thinking too

I get that an adjective describes a noun and an adverb describes a verb- yet I'm
Stil stuck 😂

Can you define a noun and a verb?

An adverb describes the way an action/doing word (verb) is done, e.g. 'He ran quickly'. 'She smiled sadly'.

Adjective is a describing word 'pretty', 'stunning' 'rigid'.

And OP,I doubt very much you are thick. Don't be so hard on yourself!

Agree that example 3 doesn't have a pronoun.

Re: adverbs and adjectives - just think adverbs "describe" verbs in some way and adjectives describe nouns. They simply give more information about the nouns/verbs.

JK Rowling gives all her verbs an adverb and all her nouns an adjective. It's very irritating when you notice it. 😂 Harry runs quickly, Hermione shouts loudly etc etc

goodness, I have made it to 60 and have never needed to know that - what a stupid waste of time

I imagine there are lots of things you learned at school that you don't happen to have needed to.know since. Does that mean they were all a stupid waste of time? At least indefinite articles are things you regularly use (unlike algebra or knowledge about the Romans or oxbow lakes, probably). There's no harm in knowing the names of different types of word in your own language, surely?

And no, not knowing these things does not make you thick at all, OP. English grammar has barely been taught in schools for many decades, until the new SATs were brought in. From my point of view, it's much easier to teach foreign languages to people who actually have at least some vague clue about how their own language works!

Am I the only one who read the thread subject and thought it was about all the crazy pronouns people use for gender nowadays 😅

I confess I thought exactly that.

He jumped high over the fence - high is describing ´jump’ which is the verb. So it’s an adverb.
The fence was high. - high is describing the fence, which is a noun in this sentence so ´high’ is an adjective here.

Am I the only one who read the thread subject and thought it was about all the crazy pronouns people use for gender nowadays

Well, one positive side effect of all that insanity is that at least more people sort of know what a pronoun is

no harm in learning it in your own time if it interests you - this is just bollox of no value to anyone.

Algebra has many practical functions, learning about Romans helps you understand your own culture and identity, as well as government, politics and human nature. Oxbow lakes I never learnt about, its only if you CHOOSE geography at GCSE as far as I know.

This rubbish has nothing going for it. I speak several languages, and it doesn't even help with that. It doesn't help with learning languages, or history, or linguistics, or grammar, and it doesn't enhance communication in any way at all. Its total pointless rubbish. No one in the world needs to know what an "indefinite article" is, unless they are required to teach someone else what an indefinite article is.

I agree with you on that one, the homework my dd used to bring home had me scratching my head a few times and wondering whether they'd got the question right.

I'd also say the 4th one is a bit suspect as well, since the word 'nothing' has a specific meaning. It means zero. None. That's not indefinite at all.

This rubbish has nothing going for it. I speak several languages, and it doesn't even help with that. It doesn't help with learning languages, or history, or linguistics, or grammar, and it doesn't enhance communication in any way at all. Its total pointless rubbish. No one in the world needs to know what an "indefinite article" is, unless they are required to teach someone else what an indefinite article is.

I presume you mean an indefinite pronoun. I definitely think people should know what an indefinite article is. In any case, I also speak (and teach) several languages, and I disagree. I think it's bizarre how scared of, or at least hostile to, grammatical terminology people often are. It's no more inherently silly or pointless to know the names of parts of speech than it is to know the names of elements in chemistry, dynamics in music, or things in any school subject. It's much easier to talk about what's grammatically wromg with your writing if you can call things by their proper names.

everything else you mention has a proper practical purpose though, but this doesn't have any purpose at all

But it's absolutely fascinating.

everything else you mention has a proper practical purpose though, but this doesn't have any purpose at all

Those things don't end up ever having a purpose for the vast majority of people who learn them. What proportion of people need to know about chemical elements once they leave school, compared with people who might sometimes need to think about or refer to the correctness of their, or of somebody else's, English? Yes of course it's possible to say 'that sentence is wrong' without knowing basic grammatical terminology, but if asked why it's wrong, most English speakers would be pushed to give any better answer than 'I dunno. It just sounds wrong', which isn't very helpful in terms of explaining how to write it correctly next time.

Knowing the names for things can help with that. Sure, 'indefinite pronoun' may not be top of the list of the most useful grammatical terms to know, but the principle stands.

Thankyou for that - I was never taught grammar, so very interesting.