English Grammar Guide

Search for an English grammar guide and you will mostly find two things: enormous reference sites that list every rule ever written, and thin pages that stop just where the explanation gets useful. This page is our attempt at something more practical. It gathers the grammar lessons our teachers have written for real students — the explanations we actually use in class at Kensington English — and organises them into a single guide you can work through at your own pace, in order or by topic.

First, a little honesty about grammar: you do not need all of it at once. English has hundreds of describable rules, but a small core does most of the work in everyday speech and writing — the twelve tenses (really the three or four you use constantly), the articles a, an and the, the prepositions that pin words to time and place, and the conditional patterns that let you talk about possibility. Learn that core properly and the rest becomes detail you can add as you go. That is how this guide is arranged: the structural essentials first, then the word-level patterns that make your English sound natural, and finally the vocabulary habits that keep everything growing.

How you use it depends on where you are. If you are studying on your own, start at the top of the first section and take one lesson at a time — each post is a complete, self-contained lesson of about ten minutes, with clear examples and the typical mistakes to avoid. If you already know your weak spot — articles, say, or phrasal verbs — jump straight to it; the lessons do not depend on each other. Whichever route you take, do something with each rule the same day you read about it: write three sentences of your own, or say them aloud. Grammar learned passively evaporates; grammar used once is already half-remembered.

The guide suits learners from roughly A2 to C1 on the CEFR scale — that is, from "I can hold a simple conversation" to "I work in English but still make mistakes I can't explain". Exam candidates will find that the tense, punctuation and vocabulary lessons map directly onto what IELTS writing examiners reward. Everything is written in British English by our teaching team in London, and everything here is free. If you are not sure which level you are, take the free level test first — knowing your level tells you which lessons will pay off fastest.