Foreign language instruction should begin in kindergarten

3. Adverbs with adjectives

In English we very often use adverbs with adjectives – it’s a common pattern you want to notice and learn from. We use the structure mostly when we want to emphasise something.

There a number of words we use in this way – some of the most common are

really

especially

particularly

fairly

slightly

So we can be emphatic in this way:

The park where I live is beautiful [no emphasis]

The park where I live is especially beautiful [emphasis]

A grammatical problem

One problem with this is that in English we make a difference between adjectives that are gradable and non-gradable. Put simply this means we can say

absolutely boiling

fairly old

but not

absolutely old

fairly boiling

This can be a little tricky and you’ll find a link at the bottom of the page with more help.