Complete the father's instruction in this family scene.
Your little brother keeps playing video games instead of doing homework. Your dad steps in with clear instructions.
Dad told him ___ his homework first.
The correct answer is to do.
The pattern is tell + object + to-infinitive: Dad told him to do his homework. The to is required after the object.
Infinitive
If you've ever written I enjoy to swim or He let me to go and only later learned why both are wrong — you've hit the infinitive's main puzzle. English is fussy: some verbs demand the to-infinitive, some demand the bare infinitive, some demand the gerund, and a few accept multiple options with different meanings (remember to lock vs remember locking).
The infinitive is the basic form of a verb, used non-finitely. The to-infinitive (to go) follows verbs like want, decide, plan; the bare infinitive (go) follows modal verbs (can, will) and causatives (Let him go).
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.
Complement
If you've ever written Ryan is and felt the sentence had nowhere to go, you've felt the pull of a missing complement. Some verbs — be, seem, become, call, consider — flatly refuse to stand alone; they need a complement to point at, and leaving it out makes the sentence collapse mid-thought.
A complement is a word, phrase, or clause that completes the meaning of an expression. Subject complements describe the subject after linking verbs (She is a doctor); object complements describe the object after certain transitive verbs (We elected her chair).
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: Medium
If easy questions feel too obvious but hard questions leave you guessing, you're probably ready for Medium — the level where most real learning happens. It pushes just enough to expose the rules you don't quite have yet, without burying you in edge cases. This is where steady fluency is built, one well-aimed challenge at a time.
The Medium difficulty tag marks middle-range challenges — typically A2 to B1. One rule per question, realistic distractors, and contexts that require active thought rather than instant recognition.