How to use RELATIVE ADVERBS in English

What are RELATIVE ADVERBS? Words like 'when' 'where' and 'why' are RELATIVE ADVERBS and we use them to connect information in sentences. They will really help you to improve your English grammar, both when you're writing and when you're speaking.

0:00 What are RELATIVE ADVERBS?
0:48 Examples of RELATIVE ADVERBS
2:21 RELATIVE ADVERBS practice quiz

TRANSCRIPT

We've been looking at relative clauses in the previous video. In this video, we're going to look at relative adverbs. Now these are very useful words that we use to connect sentences in English. I'll show you a few examples and then we'll do a bit of practice at the end to see how well you've understood it. The relative adverbs we use in English are 'where', 'when' and 'why'. Now we could just use a preposition and 'which' to join sentences together, but in English that would sound quite formal so it's more common we use these relative adverbs to sound more natural in English. So an example would be: "That is the place in which I met my girlfriend". So firstly, it's a bit long and secondly it does sound quite formal, right? So if we use a relative adverb it will sound a lot more natural. "That is where I met my girlfriend". So it sounds much better and much shorter, right?

So I'm sure you've noticed that these relative adverbs are question words: 'where', 'when' and 'why'. So it might help to think about the sentences that you're joining together with a question. Here's the question for that first example: "Where did you meet your girlfriend?" "That is where I met my girlfriend". So remember, this is not a question anymore, it's now a statement, which means you need to use normal subject - verb - object sentence structure. "I met my girlfriend". Here's an example with 'when': "When are you going to ask her to marry you?" "I will ask her when I am ready". And here's an example with 'why': "Why is your girlfriend angry with you?" "I don't know why she is angry with me".

OK, let's do some practice. I'm going to give you some example sentences and I want you to use the correct relative adverb to improve each sentence. If you need more time to think of your answer or to write down your answer, that would be a good idea, then pause the video after each example.

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