🎨 Grammar B2-12: Adjectives and adverbs: advanced
At B1 you learned to reach past “very”. This B2 lesson turns modification into a precision tool. First it completes the gradable / ungradable pairing: very and extremely belong to adjectives on a dial, absolutely, utterly and completely belong to extremes and either-or words such as exhausted, furious, impossible and essential — and quite reverses its own meaning depending on which kind it meets, so quite good is faint praise while quite impossible means completely. Then it walks the adjective ladder — opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose — with worked runs and an honest note that two or three adjectives is the real ceiling in professional writing. Finally it tours adverb position and scope: only, even and just point forward at the phrase beside them, sentence adverbs comment from the front with a comma, and frequency and certainty adverbs live in mid-position. A travel review, a gradable-versus-ungradable sorter, error repairs and thirty-two multiple-choice decisions drill all three.
Lesson Plan
- Modification as meaning, not decoration
- The three questions: strength, order, scope
Key Vocabulary
Grammar Points
- Gradable adjectives take dial intensifiers (very, extremely, incredibly, rather, fairly); ungradable adjectives — extremes such as exhausted, furious, freezing and either-or words such as impossible, essential, spotless — take absolutely, utterly, completely, totally or simply; really works with both
- Quite has no fixed strength: with a gradable adjective it means fairly and downgrades, with an either-or adjective it means completely; not quite always means not completely
- Adjective order before a noun: opinion → size → age → shape → colour → origin → material → purpose, with a comma between adjectives from the same slot and two or three as the practical maximum
- Only, even and just take their meaning from the phrase immediately to their right, so moving them rewrites the claim
- Sentence adverbs stand at the front with a comma; frequency and certainty adverbs take mid-position after be or the first auxiliary, and go in front of a negative auxiliary
- Look-alike pairs (hard/hardly, late/lately, high/highly, near/nearly, free/freely) are separate words, not adverb forms of each other
Prerequisites
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