I know I can say: My hobby is swimming. But when I'm told to tell which part of speech "swimming" is, I still doubt whether It's a noun or a verb. My guess is I put a noun after "hobby is".
This problem came from an English learner who asked me to correct their sentence in a forum. Their sentence is:
My hobby is my garden and my flower.
I know, there's something wrong, though, I'm not sure since I'm also a learner. We help each other to correct our mistakes. Although, I would write this way if I were they:
My hobby is gardening and making a flower bouquet.
But I can't explain why. Could you help me to explain which one is better to write? Also, even though I added the possessive "my" in the front of the base noun (I don't know what it's called), isn't it called a noun-phrase, thus still a noun? If my guess were correct, would it be OK to write like the first one?
Thanks in advance!
Best Answer
Swimming is a gerund used as a noun. There's nothing wrong with saying "My hobby is my garden", but referring to 'flower' in the singular is odd - obviously the gardener grows more than one!
They could have said "My hobby is my garden, especially growing flowers". (They may mean that they also cut the flowers to make bouquets, but not necessarily.)