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Adjectives & Adverbs

Descriptive adjectives, placement rules, comparative and superlative forms, and basic adverbs
Order of adjectives
a lovely big old red Italian car — opinion / size / age / colour / origin
Opinion adjectives come first
a beautiful small painting / a horrible cold winter — opinion first
Intensifiers: very / really / quite / pretty
very tired, really happy, quite interesting, pretty good — before adjective
Extremely / incredibly / absolutely
extremely important, incredibly fast, absolutely brilliant
Gradable vs non-gradable adjectives
"very tired" (gradable) ✓ / "absolutely exhausted" (non-gradable) ✓ / "very exhausted" ✗
"enough" — position
I have enough money / It's big enough / She's good enough — after adjective
"too" + adjective
too hot, too expensive, too difficult — implies a negative/problem
Adverbial phrases of time
in the morning, at night, during the week, for two hours, last year
Adverbial phrases of place
at the park, in the city centre, near the station, on the corner
Sentence adverbs: fortunately / unfortunately
Fortunately, it didn't rain / Unfortunately, she was late — at sentence start