How English works
Grammar you can drill is on the rest of the site. This is the part you have to understand first: where a rule comes from, when it stops working, and what speakers actually do.
Why a cow is Saxon but beef is Norman
The animal has an English name and the meat a French one. The split is nearly a thousand years old, and it still decides which word sounds plain and which sounds grand.
Say, tell, speak, talk: which one goes where
Four verbs where many languages have one. The difference is less about meaning than about what comes next.
PREsent or preSENT: when stress changes the word
Record, present, object and many words like them are two words under one spelling. The stressed syllable tells you which word it is, and so does the vowel that loses the stress. Once you hear that vowel, you can say both words correctly.
Present perfect or past simple?
Both of them look back. Only one of them also says: and it matters now.
Why it’s always chit-chat and never chat-chit
Nobody is taught this rule. Every English speaker keeps it anyway — and you can hear the moment it breaks.
Reported speech: when the tense really shifts back
Backshift is not a reflex. It depends on when the words were said — and on whether they are still true.
Practice, not just reading →
Fill-in-the-gap drills across 29 grammar topics, built from more than 50,000 sentences checked by hand.