This summer I went some kind of diving in Bali with my family. When we were done, I talked to a diving coach, in English. We chatted and chatted. Yet, all of a sudden, something popped into my mind. What is that something? In our conversation, I found something, something that is unique to most Asian languages. What is it? There is a missing baby.
A. What is a Missing Baby (Verb)?
Read our conversation and you will know what I am talking about.
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Me
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You live here, right? So what do you think about Bali?
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Coach
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Bali good. People nice.
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Me |
Yes, coaches here are good and nice too.
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So you may ask: What is the problem with saying Bali good instead of ‘Bali is good‘. There will not be any problem if you don’t want to speed up your learning of English.
B. Three Types of Verbs
If you want to enhance your proficiency in English, both written and spoken, (there is) one thing you can’t afford to miss:
Types of Verbs
If you think I am going to give you some grammatical terms that are boring and dry, well think again. There are funny names for the three types of verbs in English, namely:
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Type 1
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 Baby Verbs
e.g. is/am/are/was/were/been
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Type 2
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 Non-Baby Verbs e.g. run a business, develop a program, discuss an issue |
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Type 3
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 Helping Verbs Can you name the three types of verbs? |
For this post the focus is on the first type of verbs: Baby Verbs. Why do I call them Baby Verbs? Well, they do ‘almost nothing‘. What do I mean by ‘almost nothing’? They (Baby Verbs) are just something sticky, so sticky that they link the left with the right, as shown below.
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Left
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+
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Right
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Well (being) sticky is nothing special, why do you have to care about them?
C. The Mermaid Structure
It is because there is another thing about sentence structures of English. What is it? It has something to do with diving too. Before you get the answer, check out the following mermaid.
What do you see? Now look at it again from another angle (perspective):
Do you see that? What? The mermaid is ‘divided’ into three parts. So what is my point? You can break a sentence in English into three parts? Which three: Head, Body, and Tail. So do you think you can give the following sentence a go? Break it into three.
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HEAD
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BODY
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TAIL
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Creating a new business model
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is
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not so easy.
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The problem of Missing Babies becomes more serious if you try to make a long sentence (at a meeting):
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Head
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Body
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|Tail
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What I am going to present today
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Missing Baby Verb
(is)
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a plan to change the world
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So for the sake of easy memory, we will give the structure a name: Hot Mermaid (Head, Body, & Tail).
