Name: Adjectives #5 | Intensifiers + Mitigators | Basic English Grammar
Uploaded: 2020-08-12T19:30:12.000Z
Duration: 12 min 21 s
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Hello students and welcome back to my  English course on adjectives.

To-infinitive

In this video, I'm going to talk to you about intensifiers and mitigators.

Intensifiers are simply words that will make adjectives stronger.

They will give adjectives more power or more emphasis.

For example, two very common intensifiers in English are 'really' and 'very'.

Mitigators on the other hand, make the adjectives weaker like the words b'rather' or fairly'.

But we're gonna go into a little more detail.

And I have a list of intensifies for you.

Of course these are not all of them, but it's a good start because they are very common

The adjectives in this sentence is 'interesting' and we make it stronger with the intensifier,

very For example, I'm very happy to learn English.

And we give it more power with the intensifier.

For example, 'Your new dress is absolutely amazing'.

'incredibly' For example, 'Your son is incredibly smart.'

'completely' 'My wallet is completely empty.'

unusually 'The classroom was unusually quiet.'

Now for this last sentence, the adjective is old and II intensifier is enough.

It's a special case because as you can hear and see, 'enough' always comes after the

Intensifiers are commonly used with comparative and superlative adjectives.

For example, with comparative adjectives, we often use 'much'.

For example, 'He runs much faster than me.'

'Faster' is the comparative form of the adjective 'fast'.

And to intensify the comparison, we use the intensifier 'much'.

For example, 'This red bag is a lot heavier than this white bag'.

'heavier' is the comparative form of the adjective 'heavy'.

And we make it even more powerful with 'a lot heavier'.

For example, 'She is far taller than me'.

Now with superlative adjectives, we can use 'easily'.

For example, 'This is easily the best restaurant in town'.

'best' is the superlative form of the adjective 'good'.

And we make it even more powerful by saying, 'easily the best restaurant'.

For example, 'Sarah is by far the smartest girl in class'.

Now mitigators are the opposite of intensifiers.

The adjective 'sunny' is weakened by the mitigator 'fairly'.

So it's not sunny. It's a bit less than sunny.

So when I say, 'I'm rather tired', I'm not exactly tired.

The adjective is less powerful because of this 'rather'.

Or 'quite'.  Like, 'The movie was quite good'.

The adjective 'good' is less powerful because of this 'quite'.

Now be very careful because if you use 'quite' with an extreme adjective such as 'terrible',

It's more powerful because of the intensified 'quite'.

So be very careful when you use 'quite' because depending on the adjective that you

And it can be either an intensifier or a mitigator.

Just as intensifiers, mitigators can be used with comparative adjectives.

For example, 'He's a bit faster than me'.

When you say, “He's a bit faster than me,”

it's less powerful than “He's faster than me.”

So 'a bit' mitigates. It weakens 'faster'.

For example, 'This dress is rather nicer than that dress'.

For example, 'My car is slightly older than your car'.

So it's just a little bit older than your car.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Adjectives #5 | Intensifiers + Mitigators | Basic English Grammar

absolutely

pronunciation

incredibly

extremely