The Verb Do

Many people find using the ‘do’ verb quite a challenge; it need not be. Look at the following sentences picked from everyday conversation: 1) I didn’t knew you were in the classroom. 2) Youth doesn’t have money. 3) I doesn’t know the answer. 4) He didn’t went to school yesterday. These are common mistakes and very embarrassing. So what does one need to know in order to avoid such mistakes? We need to know that the do verb is an auxiliary (helping) verb. As a helping verb it combines with the main verb to form a verb phrase. In such constructions it is the do verb that controls the tense and not the main verb. The main verb remains unchanged. One of the instances in which we use such constructions is when we want to emphasise something. For example i. The students do work hard.(present tense0 ii. The students did work hard. (past tense) The main verb in each of these sentences is ‘work’. Notice it remains unchanged i.e. we do not say, ‘The students did worked hard’. So, this is the one rule you want to remember. Let us look back at the first four sentences at the beginning of this lesson. In particular sentence 1 and 4. If we follow the rule we have just learned, then it is possible to correct the mistake in these sentences. The main verb in sentence 1 is ‘knew’ and in sentence 4 it is ‘went’. The rule says that these verbs should remain unchanged. We should therefore use the base form of these verbs. If you are one of the people with this problem, attempt to correct the mistake in those two sentences before you read on. If you understood the concept, your corrected answers should read: i. I didn’t know you were in the classroom. ii. He didn’t go to school yesterday. Now, think of all the gold medals the Kenyan athletics team hoped to win at the London Olympics but did not and make sentences e.g. Kenya didn’t win a gold medal in the marathon. Now think of the things that you had planned to do yesterday but didn’t e.g. I didn’t post a grammar article yesterday. Finally, find ten things your friends and family failed to do yesterday and construct ten more sentences. Do this every day for the rest of the week until you can make the correct sentences without thinking of what form of the main verb to use. In the next post we will resolve the problem with sentence 2 and 3.