Unit 1 - Lesson 2 - Grammar and Language Notes

1. Asking about someone’s job As you can see from the dialogue the question you need is: Literally: your job what. The same structure as: Literally: your name what You will notice that in Sinhala they don’t use the verb to be as we do in English. 2. Nouns The way of expressing the idea of indefinite, definite and plural nouns is very different in Sinhala to English. We use a or an to show the noun is indefinite, the to show it is definite and generally add s or es to the end of the noun to make it plural. In Sinhala, the endings of the word change and there are rules for this depending on whether the noun is animate, inanimate, masculine or feminine etc. In short, it’s really too difficult at this stage to remember a lot of rules and then apply them as you speak, so we will list nouns with their three forms. You will start to get a feel for how different nouns change as you learn more and more and, hopefully, you will start to see the patterns. 3. Subject pronouns In lesson 1 we looked at the first three possessive adjectives my, your, his and her. In lesson two we look at the first three subject pronouns I, you, he and she. Watch for these pronouns in the following examples. In the list of jobs I did not include the word for student because if asked the question “What do you do?” a Sinhalese student would usually reply: literally: I still study  or: Literally: I university study Other examples would be: