viernes, 8 de mayo de 2015

10 tips to learn grammar




1. Read more in English.

This technique is recommended to improve your grammar. Reading helps you to see how English and grammar works. You should try to read as many different genres as you can, looking out why the grammar is used there. Each time you put attention on grammar, you are learning models of correct grammar that will help you in your own writing and speaking. If you read on e-readers, there is the possibility to use a dictionary and you can create and study a list of new words.




2. Write more in English.

Usually you have to write for English courses, where you practice specific topics, but a creative idea is to write a daily journal in English. Don’t worry about correctness of your grammar or vocabulary, just try your best and later you can go back over your entries and grade yourself.

If you don’t want to follow a diary, you can participate on forums, chat rooms, or microblogging sites.



3. Understand the building blocks of grammar

It is important to know the different parts of speech like nouns, pronouns, articles, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections. You can looking for it like short explanations of a grammar rule and simple examples. For each new rule, you should write your own examples.


4. Pay attention to sentence structures

When you read an article or watch a movie, it is important to pay attention to how sentences are constructed and the grammar rules used. This helps to use sentence structures on your spoken and written English skills.


5. Grammar exercises will help you

If you want to take advantage of grammar exercises, you will find out your weaknesses first, after you are able to correctly assess your weaknesses.

On internet you can try free grammar exercises that contains contain dialogues, interrogative and statement (or narrative) sentences on everyday topics, thematic texts and narrative stories are especially effective for mastering grammatical structures. You can visit:

For beginners & intermediate:

For intermediate advanced:

Other tools are Grammar Games and Apps for your phone or tablet. The app teach you better grammar skills. If the game is funny you are getting your daily grammar practice will be a piece of cake.


6. Find a mentor

The mentor is a person who will make suggestions and corrections about your English skills. A mentor could be a friend or a partner who has a strong command over English grammar. The main rule on these relation is to speak only in English with your mentor and ask the mentor to point out your mistakes. This real time feedback is very beneficial in improving grammar.


7. Backlog Analysis: unlearn typical English mistakes

The same grammar mistakes that prevent you from getting that better English skills will be unlearned with a backlog. Ego4u backlog contains 26 most commons problems with explanations, exercises and tips.

It’s recommended to go through the explanations and exercises in a grammar reference or textbook. You should pick out one problem, and write down it on the category listed in the backlog. You select a new problem when you solve the selected previously. If you want to keep it tracked, you can download a spreadsheet from here.



8. English Gap-Filling Exercises

If you can make your own exercises copying the text and deleting some words in the copy. , e.g.:
  • prepositions
  • adjectives
  • verbs in a certain tense
It will be a group activity where everyone prepares a short text and gives a copy to the others, the other members will try to fill the gaps correctly.

Try to fill the gaps correctly and then take the original text to check your answers.


9. Concordancer software:

If you want to learn how words and grammar woks, you can use a computer program named concordance to find examples of words in short sentence extracts from books or newspapers.

If you study these examples you can more easily work out for yourself the grammar rule about using the present perfect continuous tense.



10. “Word Per Day” Blogs, Apps, and Emails

While vocabulary isn't strictly about grammar but if you learn words it will give you more time to concentrate on other aspects. Many online dictionary sites and apps have a “word of the day”. For each new word you should write almost 1 sentence. They are easy to learn if you say them to yourself many times.