English grammar has a reputation for being chaotic. It is not. It is mostly regular, with a small set of high-frequency exceptions that look worse than they are because you meet them on day one. Get the shape of the system first, and the details stop feeling like a list of unrelated rules.
How English grammar actually works
English is an analytic language. That is the single most useful thing to know. Where languages like Spanish, French or German pack meaning into word endings, English leans on two things instead: word order and small helper words.
- Word order carries the meaning. "The dog bit the man" and "The man bit the dog" use the same words and mean opposite things. The order is not decoration, it is the grammar. English is firmly subject-verb-object, and you break that order far less freely than in most European languages.
- Auxiliary verbs do the heavy lifting. English barely conjugates. A regular verb has just four forms (work, works, worked, working). Everything else, questions, negatives, tenses, the passive, is built with helper verbs: do, be, have, will, and the modals. Learn how the helpers behave and you have learned most of the verb system.
This is why the tenses look intimidating but are not. There are not really twelve separate things to memorise. There is one present, one past, and a handful of auxiliaries (be for the continuous, have for the perfect, will and going to for the future) that combine in predictable ways.
Where learners actually struggle
Having spent a year teaching English in a French lycee, I can tell you the mistakes are remarkably consistent across first languages. The trouble spots are rarely the obscure rules. They are:
- the present perfect, because most languages do not split "I have done" from "I did" the way English does;
- the articles a, an and the, because plenty of languages have no articles at all and the rules feel arbitrary until you see the pattern;
- prepositions, because they almost never translate one-to-one;
- and phrasal verbs, because "look up", "look after" and "look into" share a verb and mean nothing alike.
The pages below tackle each of these head on, with the rule, the reasoning, and the specific errors to stop making.
How to use this catalog
If you are starting out, work through the tenses in order: present simple, present continuous, past simple, then the future. Add articles and prepositions early, because they appear in every sentence you will ever write. Once those are comfortable, the present perfect, modals and phrasal verbs are the intermediate core, and reported speech and conditionals round out B2.
Every topic page gives you clear rules, natural examples you can lift straight into your own writing, the common mistakes ranked by how often they trip learners up, and a short practice set with answers so you can check yourself.