Basics. Adjective + To Infinitive Patterns
Adjective + To Infinitive Patterns
In English, many adjectives are naturally followed by a to infinitive to express feelings, give opinions, or describe how difficult something is. For example, you might say, "I am thrilled to see you," or "This puzzle is hard to solve." Using the to infinitive instead of a gerund (-ing form) after these specific adjectives is a key pattern for sounding natural.
In this challenge, you will practice pairing adjectives with the correct infinitive forms across a variety of fun and dramatic scenarios. You'll help a horrified student whose pet iguana ate their history essay, complete a clumsy wizard's diary, review a ridiculously tall burger that is "impossible to eat," and log an astronaut's struggles with zero-gravity coffee.
You will work through 12 questions featuring a mix of single-choice, multi-choice, drop-down, and drag-and-drop formats.
Try the quiz to check your knowledge!
Adjective
If you've ever written a French nice old wooden table and felt something was wrong without knowing why, you've hit the adjective-order rule. English insists on a particular sequence — opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material — and rearranging the words makes a sentence sound non-native even when every individual choice is correct.
An adjective describes a noun or pronoun: a tall building, the soup is hot. Most adjectives also take comparative and superlative forms (taller, tallest), which is how you compare things — another core piece you need from day one.
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).
Gerund
If you've ever said I enjoy to read or good at to swim and wondered why it sounded wrong, you've met the gerund. English is fussy about which structures take -ing and which take to + verb, and getting this wrong is one of the most common giveaways that someone learned grammar from a list rather than from real usage.
A gerund is the -ing form of a verb acting as a noun — reading, swimming, being late. After many common verbs (enjoy, avoid, finish) and after every preposition, English demands the gerund, never the infinitive.
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).
Participle
If you've ever written I should have went and been corrected to should have gone — you've hit the past participle's main rule. The participle isn't an exotic form; it's the workhorse that builds perfect tenses, passive voice, and dozens of common adjectives. Get the irregular ones automatic and your tenses fall into place.
A participle is a verb form acting as an adjective or adverb. The present participle is the -ing form (running, sitting); the past participle is -ed (regular: walked) or irregular (broken, gone, written). Participles build perfect tenses, progressive tenses, and the passive.
Phrase
If you've ever read a long sentence in English and felt lost in the middle, you've hit a sentence with too many phrases stacked together. Learning to spot phrases — on the table, the man with the hat, very quickly — turns dense prose into something you can parse: each phrase is one chunk of meaning, not a string of unrelated words.
A phrase is a group of words functioning as a single unit in a sentence, without a subject + verb pair (which would make it a clause). Types include noun phrase (the red car), verb phrase (has been running), prepositional phrase (on the table), and adjective/adverb phrases.
Present tense
If you've ever told someone I am living here for ten years (should be have lived or have been living) — you've hit the present perfect's main puzzle. English insists that "started in the past, still true now" lives in the present perfect, not the simple present. Internalise that one rule and a whole class of common errors disappears.
The present tense in English has four forms: simple present (I work) for habits and general truths; present progressive (I am working) for now or temporary; present perfect (I have worked) for past with present relevance; present perfect progressive (I have been working) for ongoing duration up to now.
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.
Simple tense
If you're at A1/A2 and the array of English tenses feels overwhelming, here's the good news: most of what you need to say at the start fits in the simple forms. I work, I worked, I will work — three forms cover habits, completed past actions, and basic future. Master these first; the progressive and perfect come more easily once the simple is solid.
The simple aspect is the unmarked verb form — no progressive -ing, no have + past participle. I go, I went, I will go. Marks single completed actions, habits, or permanent states.
B1 | Intermediate
If you can hold a conversation about your weekend, explain why you're late, and follow a short news story without panicking — but still feel lost in fast or technical English — you're probably operating at B1. Knowing this matters: study material at the wrong level either bores you or burns you out, and B1 is the typical target for travel, casual work, and most everyday social English.
B1 is the intermediate level in the CEFR framework, where you handle everyday English independently and start combining ideas with complex sentences, passive voice, and modal verbs.
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.