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Chef Marco is teaching a beginner's cooking class. Complete his instructions by choosing the best word for each gap.
First, _________________________ the potatoes and _________________________ the onions into small pieces. Then _________________________ the sauce gently so it doesn't burn. 🍳

The correct answers are peel, chop, and stir.

We say peel the potatoes — "peel" means to remove the skin from fruit or vegetables.

We say chop the onions — "chop" means to cut food into smaller pieces, typically with a knife.

We say stir the sauce — "stir" means to move a spoon around in a liquid to mix it.

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Verb

If grammar feels overwhelming, the fix is almost always to focus on verbs first. They carry the action, the time, the mood, and the voice — a single verb form decides whether your sentence reads as past or present, fact or hypothetical, active or passive. Get verbs solid and the rest of grammar suddenly looks much smaller.

A verb expresses action, state, or occurrence — the engine of every English sentence. Most verbs have five forms (base, -s, past tense, past participle, -ing); be has eight; modal verbs have fewer. Verbs carry tense, aspect, mood, and voice.

Imperative mood

If you've ever told a stranger Sit down! in English and watched their face drop, you've felt the imperative's main pitfall: it's grammatically simple but socially loaded. In English, bare commands often come across as rude, even when you mean them politely. Knowing when to soften them (Could you sit down?) is what separates abrupt from polite.

The imperative mood is the form for commands, instructions, and requests: Sit down, Don't touch, Have a nice trip. Bare verb form, no stated subject, negated with don't.

Collocations

If your English vocabulary is large but your speech still sounds slightly off — do a mistake, powerful coffee, high winds blew strongly — you've hit the collocation problem. Each word is correct in isolation, but native speakers don't pair them that way. Fixing it isn't about more vocabulary; it's about learning words in their natural company.

Collocations are word combinations that habitually occur together: make a decision, strong coffee, heavy rain, highly unlikely. The grammar permits other pairings, but fluent English consistently chooses one over the rest. They're the connective tissue of natural-sounding language.

Vocabulary

If you've ever known the grammar of a sentence but not the right word for what you actually wanted to say — help me, kindly, unfortunately, broke down, put up with — you've felt the limit of grammar without vocabulary. Most fluency-feel comes from word choice, not sentence structure. The Vocabulary tag is where you build that side of your English deliberately.

The Vocabulary tag groups word-focused practice — common words, collocations, phrasal verbs, idioms — across all CEFR levels from A1 to C2.

A2 | Elementary | Pre-intermediate

If you can order coffee, ask for directions, and tell someone what you did yesterday — but struggle the moment the conversation drifts into anything abstract — you're operating at A2. Knowing this matters: A2 is the level where most learners plateau because they reach for B2 material too early and burn out. Stay here and your foundations get unbreakable.

A2 is the elementary level in the CEFR framework, covering routine communication and the first wave of real grammar: past simple and continuous, present perfect, basic modal verbs, first conditional, and common verb-pattern rules.

Difficulty: Easy

If a textbook leaves you confused, sometimes the issue isn't the topic — it's that the practice material is layered with extra complications. Filtering by Easy strips that away. You get one rule at a time, in plain everyday language, with no trick questions. It's how you make a shaky foundation solid before stacking more on top.

The Easy difficulty tag marks beginner-level questions and challenges — typically A1 or early A2. Single-rule focus, short sentences, common vocabulary, one clear correct answer.