Verbs

I am feeling a tad distressed after spending the past 2 days studying verbs.

Yesterday, I tackled a very big unit of work, which might have been a mistake. It covered the infinitive form, the verb "to be", conjugation and past tense regular and irregular. Fine so far!!

Present participles and past participles seemed to be okay at the time. Auxiliary verbs and modal verb...again okay at the time but I will need to learn the 11 modal verbs. Then transitive and intransitive verbs. Which is where I began to struggle a bit (understatement).

I was quite apprehensive today. The topic was "Verbs that are not verbs" and was divided up into gerunds, participles and infinitives.

Okay so far. I passed all of the quizzes and I think my lowest grade was 95%.

Then I got to the final review. I was given 4 long sentences that made up a passage. I was then given a series of things to identify in the passage in the order they appeared in like gerunds, auxiliary verbs, present participles, past participles, intransitive verbs and transitive verbs.

I really, really struggled to the point of a big worry that I just won't be able to do this. The sentences bore no resemblance at all to the practice sentences we had been shown before. There was just too big a leap from simple to "well, this is what it's really like folks". Okay, I got 80% (pass grade 75%), but I was not happy with that and redid the test twice more to get it up to a respectable 95%. It was ridiculously hard and I felt ridiculously stupid and wondering if I am just too old to be taking something like this on.

I went onto the student forum afterwards and read that a lot of the other students had struggled on this section to. One of the girls, who had obviously studied English, said that the rules we had been given for transitive and intransitive verbs were far too simple. She gave some extra rules and hints for being able to recognise them which I will write down in my notebook when I feel less frustrated.

So, in the next few days I will be buying a grammar book which I will have by my side.

Rant over!

(By the way, my average grades so far are Nouns - 100% and Verbs - 98%)