A2 English Grammar

A2 grammar exercises

Every lesson marked above also has its own practice set: 31 sets of 60 exercises — 620 multiple-choice questions, 620 fill-in-the-blank and 620 sentence-building tasks in total. Each one is marked as you answer, keeps your score, and works without an account.

What you can do with A2 English

The Common European Framework describes A2 as the level at which a learner can handle the following. Each grammar topic below feeds directly into one or more of them.

• tell stories about your past and describe plans for the future

• explain what you like and dislike, and give simple reasons

• handle most everyday situations while travelling

• write short connected texts about familiar topics

What order to study A2 grammar in

Work through the past simple and its irregular verbs before attempting the past continuous, then add the two future forms — going to and will — as a pair, since their difference is the whole point. The present perfect deserves the most time of anything at this level, because it has no exact equivalent in most languages and it underpins a great deal of B1 grammar.

The mistakes that mark an A2 learner

These five come up more often than everything else combined at this level. None of them stops you being understood, which is precisely why they survive so long — nobody corrects them in conversation.

• ✗ I have seen him yesterday. ✓ I saw him yesterday.

  A stated finished time makes the past simple compulsory. The present perfect deliberately leaves the time open, so it cannot sit beside yesterday, last week or in 2019. This is the defining A2 grammar point.

• ✗ I am living here since 2019. ✓ I have lived here since 2019.

  For something that started in the past and continues now, English uses the present perfect, not the present continuous. Since takes a starting point; for takes a duration.

• ✗ She is more taller than me. ✓ She is taller than me.

  Never both -er and more. Short adjectives take -er; longer ones take more. And very cannot modify a comparative — you need much taller.

• ✗ You mustn’t come if you don’t want. ✓ You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.

  Mustn’t means it is forbidden; don’t have to means it is optional. Confusing them can reverse your meaning entirely, which makes this one of the higher-stakes errors at A2.

• ✗ If it will rain, we will stay in. ✓ If it rains, we will stay in.

  The first conditional puts the present simple after if and will in the other half. English never doubles will across both clauses.

How to know you have really reached A2

A2 is secure when the choice between the past simple and the present perfect stops being a coin toss. The test is not whether you know the rule but whether you notice the time expression before you choose the verb — yesterday should trigger the past simple automatically. You should also be able to compare two things without hesitating over -er versus more, and to give advice with should and state a rule with have to without mixing them. If you can tell a five-minute story about a holiday that went wrong, switching between the two past tenses as the timeline demands, you are ready for B1.

A2 English grammar: frequently asked questions