Verb Classification

We divide verbs into two broad classifications:

Imagine that a stranger walks into your room and says:

Do you understand anything? Has this person communicated anything to you? Probably not! That's because these verbs are helping verbs and have no meaning on their own. They are necessary for the grammatical structure of the sentence, but they do not tell us very much alone. We usually use helping verbs with main verbs. They "help" the main verb. (The sentences in the above examples are therefore incomplete. They need at least a main verb to complete them.) There are only about 15 helping verbs.

Now imagine that the same stranger walks into your room and says:

Do you understand something? Has this person communicated something to you? Probably yes! Not a lot, but something. That's because these verbs are main verbs and have meaning on their own. They tell us something. Of course, there are thousands of main verbs.
In the following table we see example sentences with helping verbs and main verbs. Notice that all of these sentences have a main verb. Only some of them have a helping verb.

	helping verb		main verb
John			likes	coffee.
You			lied	to me.
They			are	happy.
The children	are		playing.
We	must		go	now.
I	do	not	want	any.

Helping verbs and main verbs can be further sub-divided, as we shall see on the following pages.
Helping Verbs »

English verbs come in several forms. For example, the verb to sing can be: to sing, sing, sang, sung, singing or sings. This is a total of 6 forms. Not many, considering that some languages (French, for example) have more than 30 forms for an individual verb. English tenses may be quite complicated, but the forms that we use to make the tenses are actually very simple! With the exception of the verb to be, English main verbs have only 4, 5 or 6 forms. To be has 9 forms. Do not confuse verb forms with tenses. We use the different verb forms to make the tenses, but they are not the same thing.

In this lesson we look at the forms of main verbs and helping (auxiliary) verbs, followed by a quiz to check your understanding: