I’m a native English speaker, but I never paid much attention to grammar rules and terms. I just know what sounds right. I was reading a textbook where it said の can turn a verb into a noun. The example given was the English equivalent of “run” to “running”.
I wouldn’t have guessed that running was a noun. I still have a very simplistic understanding of a noun being a physical object. Terms like nouns, adjectives, predicate, don’t come up in normal conversation and I’ve forgotten what I learnt in grade school (more than 40 years ago).
3 comments
It can be both a verb and noun
I am running -> verb
Running is fun -> noun
This is why you should be careful when you ask native speakers anything about grammar lol
That’s the thing. You know a lot of the grammar rules, you just don’t know what those rules are called, or how to explain what those rules are – they’re second nature. You know that it’s perfectly fine to say “I went for a run this morning”. You don’t stop to think that “run” in this sentence is a noun. Another example that comes intuitively is turning a noun into a verb. “Google” is a noun (a proper noun at that) but we can turn into a verb when we say we’re googling something. Same thing happens in Japanese ググる.