This is Book 1 of Professional English Practice, calibrated to A1-A2: the level where the grammar you already half know is the grammar that keeps giving you away. Every unit here repairs a form rather than introducing it. You have met am, is, are before. You have met the present simple. What you have not had is one page that says exactly where yours goes wrong and what to say instead.

Forty-four units carry you from the verb to be through the present, the past, the future and the modals, ending with the relative clause that lets you stop speaking in short separate sentences. Each one stands on its own, so you can work the book start to finish or open directly to the thing that tripped you up this week.

Every scene in it is a workplace scene. Not a train station, not a holiday, not a shopping list: a first day, a room that is free at two, a report that has to be finished before you can relax, the colleague who joined last week and whose name you did not catch.

Every unit follows the same three-part cycle, so the shape never surprises you.

Access. A short workplace conversation with the target grammar already in it, in blue. You are noticing the pattern, not producing it. Every line has audio. Tap any line to hear it on its own, or play the whole conversation from the button underneath. Then three questions, and they are built so that reading the words without reading the grammar gets them wrong.

Analysis. One question the unit turns on, the form laid out as a table you can copy, then the explanation, the cards, and the mistakes worth naming, each with the wrong sentence printed beside the right one. One figure, because an idea you can see has a shape and not just a rule.

Activation. Eight exercises moving from mechanical accuracy to your own sentences: gaps, repair, the vocabulary, a sentence of your own, five drawings to describe, a line to record, and a speaking task to do with somebody else. The first item of every written exercise is done for you. The key is inside each exercise: press Check and the right form appears beside anything you missed.

Two ways through it. Start to finish, or unit by unit using the search below. Do not skip the last exercise. The pair work and the speaking are where the grammar stops being a rule you know and becomes a sentence you actually say.

I wrote this book for the person who is told he is a beginner and knows he is not.

You have studied English before. You can order lunch, you can read most of an email, you can follow a meeting if nobody speeds up. And you still say I have 29 years, still say Am a nurse, still put the in front of a job and leave it out in front of a room. Nobody corrects it, because everybody understands you. That is exactly the problem: nothing is broken enough to fix itself.

Those errors are not carelessness and they are not a small vocabulary. They are your own language doing its job underneath, quietly, in the places where English happens to work differently. A book that only shows you the correct form leaves that machinery running. So this one prints the wrong sentence next to the right one and names it, because you cannot stop making a mistake you have never seen written down.

None of it is English for its own sake. Every scene in this book could happen at your job before Friday, which is the only test I trust.

Mind your future. It is closer than you think, and it is going to need you to say the right thing at the right time.