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: B2
Wish and If Only: The Grammar of ‘I Should Have’
I sometimes lie awake and think: I wish I had written that down. If only I had kept a record from the beginning. Now I write everything. But the grammar of regret — wish and…
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.…
Third Conditional: The Grammar of Regret
After the incident at work that cost me a role I had trained for, I spent weeks thinking in the third conditional: If I had known, I would have done it differently. If they had…
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…
The Passive Voice: When the Action Matters More Than the Actor
💬 From my own experience: In hotel incident reports, we always wrote 'The bottle was broken' rather than 'Tom broke the bottle.' That passive form is not evasion — it focuses attention on the event,…
Present Perfect vs Past Simple: When Time Matters
When I arrived in Sydney in 2005, my English was, in my own words, horrible. A customer once asked me, "Have you ever worked in hospitality?" I said, "Yes, I worked." Wrong. I should have…
Writing a CV in English: Structure and Key Phrases (B2/C1)
🎙 From the classroom: I've written my CV in English, French, and Bengali. The English version is the hardest — not because of language, but because of culture. A British or Australian CV is concise,…
Giving a Presentation in English: Structure and Signposting (B2)
🎙 From the classroom: I've given dozens of training briefings to hotel teams in Sydney — shift handovers, product launches, standards updates. The teams who remembered information were the ones who could anticipate the structure.…