Starting English grammar again

Why you get stuck again

Plenty of people studied grammar at school yet still cannot produce sentences when they speak or write. Usually they learned grammar as rules for choosing the right answer on a test and rarely used those rules to build sentences of their own. They know many terms and exceptions but lack the ability to put basic sentences together quickly. When restarting, it is faster to build up the essential skeleton by actually writing with it than to sweep through every chapter from the beginning.

Start with the skeleton

The basic English sentence is subject, then verb, then an object or a complement. Many languages drop the subject or put the verb last, but English almost always states the subject and says the verb early — so much so that it adds a dummy subject when talking about the weather or the time. When building a sentence, decide who does what first and attach the rest afterwards. Long, complicated sentences are this same skeleton with modifiers added, so practising finding the skeleton helps your reading just as much.

Verb forms tell the time

English changes the form of the verb to show when something happened, whether it is in progress, and whether it is finished but still affects the present. The past simple treats a finished event as separate from now; the present perfect is used when a past event connects to the present. That is why two forms that translate the same way in many languages are used differently in English. Rather than memorising a whole tense table, picture situations you talk about often and learn the form each one needs.

Articles and countable nouns

For speakers of languages without them, articles and noun number are often the longest-lasting confusion. Every time English uses a noun, it signals whether it is countable, whether there is one or several, and whether the listener knows which one is meant. Start from the broad principle: "a" for one thing mentioned for the first time, "the" for something both people already know. Rules alone only go so far, so also memorise nouns together with their articles as chunks when you meet them in reading. A wrong article rarely blocks meaning, so it matters more not to stop speaking in an attempt to get them perfect from the start.

An order for relearning

Not every chapter matters equally. Firm up what you use every day when speaking and writing first; rarer structures can wait until you meet them in reading.

• Subject, verb and basic word order
• Present, past and future, plus continuous and perfect forms
• Making questions and negatives
• Articles and singular and plural nouns
• Modals for ability, obligation and likelihood
• Joining sentences with conjunctions and relative clauses

Choosing one grammar book

Working through one thin book several times is far better than buying several and reading only the first chapters. Choose one with short explanations, lots of examples and writing exercises in every unit. On the first pass, mark anything you do not understand and keep going; the point is to get a map of the whole. From the second pass on, focus on the parts you marked and the exercises you got wrong. Looking at the examples and guessing the rule yourself before reading the explanation makes the same material stay with you much longer.

Make sentences, do not just read

With grammar there is a big gap between feeling you understand and being able to use it. After learning a rule, write three or four sentences about your own life with it and read them aloud. The more realistic the content — what you did yesterday, what you will do tomorrow, what you like — the better it sticks. Keep the sentences and revisit them a few days later to correct them; your recurring mistakes will start to stand out. If you can, have a proficient speaker or a correction tool check them as well, then read the corrected versions aloud so the same mistake comes up less often.

Checking common mistakes

The errors people make when relearning tend to cluster in the same places. Checking just the items below after you write will noticeably improve accuracy.

• The verb ending for a third-person singular subject in the present
• Using a singular noun when you mean more than one
• Missing articles, or articles on uncountable nouns
• Tenses that wander back and forth within one piece