In Russian, the order of adjectives rarely matters. A native English speaker will also not consider a chaotic word order a gross mistake, but he will easily recognize a foreigner in a speaker if he starts to build a sentence in the way he is used to. The order of adjectives in an English sentence is a simple but practice-requiring topic that is often neglected - understandably - by beginners, but simply cannot be ignored by professionals. To determine the order in which adjectives should be placed, it is important to first understand what categories they generally fall into.
Subjective and objective adjectives
This rule is quite simple and works if no more than two adjectives belong to one noun in a sentence.
| Subjective adjective | Objective adjective | |
| Identifies: | Characterization of the object, which the speaker gives him. His assessment based on personal opinion,judgments, relationships. Like/dislike, nice/ugly, nice/unpleasant and so on | Actual, real and common for all people visible or invisible property of an object. For example, the sky is always blue for everyone, clean water is clear, and sugar is sweet |
| The sentence is: | First | Second |
| Example: | A cute little girl, a beautiful red dress, a sad documentary movie | |
| Translation: |
Cute (subjectively) little (actually) little girl, beautiful red dress, sad documentary |
|
To put it simply: before describing an item, you should first give it your own assessment, and then name a known factual property that can be checked.
More complicated cases
Of course, it is impossible to always build sentences and describe objects and phenomena using only two adjectives. In Russian, people often use whole descriptive chains, for example: "warm, pleasant, clear, sunny, long-awaited summer day." As a rule, few people in such cases care about the order of adjectives. In English sentences, doing without such chains is no easier, but you have to rack your brains.
- An adjective describing the overall quality of the item should always come first. For example, its price, condition, the most important characteristic: new - new, broken - broken, expensive -expensive, cheap - cheap.
- Followed by an adjective describing size: giant - giant, big - large, medium - medium, little - small, wee - tiny, wide - wide, narrow - narrow.
- Then you need to specify the physical characteristics of the item: fragile - fragile, soft - soft, hard - hard, strong - strong.
- The fourth place in the series of adjectives in an English sentence should be an indication of the shape of the object: round - round, sqare - square, right-angled - rectangular.
- After that, you can and should say about the age of the object: old - old, young - young.
- Then comes an adjective indicating the color: yellow - yellow, black - black, blue - blue, white - white. This also includes indications of shades and the words dark and light - dark and light.
- An equally important element in the descriptive chain is the origin of an object or phenomenon: Russian - Russian, Spanish - Spanish, Asian - Asian.
- In eighth place is an indication of the material from which the object is made: glassy - glass, iron / ferric - iron, ceramic - ceramic.
- And last but not least, an adjective that explains why the item is needed: clearning - washing / cleaning, writting - intended for writing, reading - for reading.
The fourth and fifth item of the list can be swapped if necessary. But the rest is better to remember in strict sequence, especially for those who dream of speaking like a foreigner.
Examples of usage
Here are a few chains to follow the order of adjectives in a sentence in English.
- New (1) big (2) soft (3) square (4) wooden (8) chair - a new large soft square wooden chair.
- White (6) Asian (7) ceramic (8) tea (9) service - white Asian ceramic tea set.
- Scary (subjective adjective) giant (2) young (5) black (6) hound
A good exercise in the order of adjectives in an English sentence can be to write your own phrases, descriptive chains and sentences with a lot of definitions.
Summing up
Examples of the order of adjectives in an English sentence show and prove that, despite the fact that English seems chaotic and unusual to Russian speakers, it still has a strict structure and system of rules. Like any other, this rule is easy to learn if you try to put it into practice, find confirmation in books and analyze someone else's, literate English speech.
