G
Grammify

Topics

Practice & Reference

Practice Lab

Practise what the other Learn pages teach, using real sentences. Choose a sentence below and work through its five exercises. You name each word’s part of speech and fine-grained tag, find the role of each phrase, and rebuild the dependency tree.

What you’ll practise

  • Sort every word into one of the seventeen coarse part-of-speech categories (POS)
  • Give every word its fine-grained Penn Treebank tag (Tags)
  • Label grammatical roles by dragging across the words they cover (Roles)
  • Match given phrases to the grammatical roles they play (Role match)
  • Connect every word to its head with the right relation (Dependencies)
  • Read your accuracy and time for each exercise, and look up any label you do not know

Choose a sentence

New here? Read how the exercises work below the exercises.

Anyone can practise on these sentences, and the newest are at the top. The grey badges describe each sentence, such as Simple declarative sentence. Start with a simple sentence. A compound-complex sentence is usually the hardest.

This sentence is published — see its full analysis in the gallery →

Parts of speech

Give every word its coarse Universal Dependencies category.

Words 0/9Attempts 0Correct 0Time 0:00

Sentence — select a part of speech below, then click the word(s) it applies to

In the evening, Joe went out for a ride.

How the exercises work

Each sentence has five exercises, one on each tab. All five work the same way: choose a label, then apply it. The labels are the coloured buttons under the sentence, called the palette. Each answer is checked at once, and a wrong one gets the reply “Not quite”.

  • POS — choose a part of speech, then click each word that has it.
  • Tags — the same, with the fine-grained tags.
  • Roles — choose a role, such as Subject, then drag across the words that play it. Each correct answer is added to the constituent boxes and the Reed-Kellogg diagram below.
  • Role match — the phrases are given to you as cards. Choose a role and click each card that plays it, or click a card first and then its role.
  • Dependencies — choose a relation, then click two words: the head first, then its dependent. For ROOT, click the one word that heads the whole sentence.

In Roles and Role match, an answer can be true but not specific enough. For example, you choose Infinitive phrase, but the answer is Adverbial infinitive phrase. The reply then begins “Close” and says what to check. It counts as an attempt, not as a correct answer. You also get a “Close” reply if you drag the predicate together with the subject, or the subject without the phrase that describes it.

The palette shows only the labels this sentence needs. The number on each button, such as ×2, says how many answers with that label are still to find. A predicate split by its subject counts each piece. The button stays active until you find the last one. Then it shows a tick (✓) and the total again. Point at a finished button, or click it, to light up its answers.

A line above the sentence shows your progress (such as Words 3/9), your Attempts, your Correct answers with a percentage, and the Time. The clock starts at your first click in the exercise, not when the page opens. It stops while you work on another exercise tab or read another page of this site. It does not stop when you switch to another browser tab.

  • Restart clears this exercise’s answers, counts and time, so you can begin again.
  • Reveal all shows every answer. The exercise then counts as Skipped, not Complete, because you were shown the answers.
  • Present shows the exercise alone on the whole screen, for a projector in class or for focused work on a phone. Exit returns you to the page.
  • The ‹ Prev and Next buttons at the end of the palette light up the answers found so far, one at a time. A teacher can use them to go through a sentence with the class.

Some sentences have a picture. It appears below the exercises when you finish an exercise without Reveal all.

Where to learn each label

If you do not know a label, click the small book icon at the right end of its palette button. It opens the Learn entry for that label. Use the browser’s Back button to return: your answers are still there.

These pages teach the grammar that the exercises use: