Gerunds and Infinitives: Stop to Think vs Stop Thinking
When I was learning French as an adult — working towards C1 — I realised I had stopped thinking in English while I studied. But I had also stopped to check my English grammar. Same…
Tag: B1
Question Tags: Checking, Confirming, Connecting
Positive sentence → negative tagShe works here, doesn't she?
Countable vs Uncountable Nouns: The Rule Behind the Rule
"I need an information." I said this. In a job interview. The interviewer smiled kindly and said nothing. Information is uncountable in English — a fact that ruins sentences for speakers of almost every other…
Phrasal Verbs at Work: Put Off, Take On, Hand In
When I managed a team of fifteen at the Ivy, I learned more phrasal verbs in two months than in two years of study. "Hand in the stock report." "Don't put off the complaint." "We're…
Narrative Tenses: Telling a Story in the Past
My first year in Sydney, 2005: I had been walking for three hours when I finally found a café that was hiring. I walked in. The manager looked up. That was my start in hospitality.…
Future Forms: Will, Going To, and Present Continuous
When my daughter was born, I thought: I will teach her everything I know. But Vanessa, more practical, said: I'm going to book her first check-up tomorrow. And our neighbour texted: We're coming round on…
Second Conditional: Imagining a Different Life
People ask me: if you hadn't left Bangladesh, what would your life look like? I always pause. The second conditional is the grammar of that pause — imagining a different present by changing a past…
Reported Speech: What She Actually Said
At CDG airport, it was snowing. Vanessa had been waiting for four hours. She said: "I knew you would make it." Years later I still replay that sentence. In English, to tell someone else what…
Relative Clauses: Who, Which, That, Where
Réunion is the island where my daughter was born. The hospital where she arrived was small, clean, and impossibly calm. The nurse who handled the C-section had been working since 4 a.m. Relative clauses pack…
Articles: A, An, The — The Rules Nobody Tells You
"I want a water." I said this on my first week in Sydney. The waiter stared. Water is uncountable — you don't say a water unless you mean a bottle or a glass. Articles were…