The Intermediate level acts as a doorway that opens up new opportunities for effective communication. Although you may not be able to use English exclusively for work or study just yet, the Intermediate level equips you with essential skills to engage in conversations, express your thoughts, and navigate different situations with increased confidence. In this article, we will focus on important grammar topics that are crucial for your progress at the Intermediate level. Let’s get started!

What can you do at the B1 level?

✅ Use English at work in situations you’re familiar with;

✅ Have casual conversations and ask for help when you don’t understand something;

✅ Write simple paragraphs about things you know well;

✅ Talk about your thoughts, experiences, dreams, and plans, and explain why you think a certain way.

What grammar topics should you study at the B1 level?

Different ways of expressing future tense

In English, there are different ways to talk about what will happen in the future. When you reach the Intermediate level, you’ll learn more about these ways and be able to choose the best one to express your ideas. Here are some examples you can use:

Future Simple and “going to” for plans and intentions:

Present Continuous for a planned action that will happen in the near future:

Present Simple to express future when talking about schedules (transportation, movies):

Future Continuous when talking about a continuous action that will happen in the future for a certain period of time:

Future Perfect Simple for actions that will be completed by a certain moment in the future:

The construction “be about to do something” to describe an action that is about to happen:

The “I wish” and “If only” construction

When you wanna express regret or a wish for something to be different, you can use “I wish” and “If only.” After these constructions, put the verbs in the past tense.

The “used to” construction

Do you know how to talk about something that happened a lot in the past but doesn’t happen anymore? It’s easy in English, just use “used to” before the verb.

Conditional sentences: 2nd and 3rd conditionals

The higher your English level, the more complex thoughts you can express. When you start learning English, you can only talk about real situations. But at the Intermediate level, you can freely talk about hypothetical and imaginary situations. That’s where we use the second and third conditional sentences for that.

The second conditional talks about things that are not real and might happen in the present or future, but they’re not very likely to happen.

The third conditional talks about things that happened in the past and are not real. We use it to talk about regrets or criticize things that happened differently.

Modals of deduction

With modal verbs, you can express assumptions. Use “must” when you are at least 95% sure that something is true. Maybe you have very strong evidence:

If you are 30% to 70% sure that something is possible, use “might,” “may,” or “could”:

If you believe something is impossible, you can use “can’t” or “couldn’t”:

Passive Voice

Sometimes we don’t know who did the action, and that’s when we use the passive voice. It’s formed by using “be” with the verb in its third form:

Do you feel the difference? Who did the homework in the second sentence? We don’t know.

Congratulations on reaching the Intermediate level! Now, it’s time to keep improving your English skills and continue your language learning journey. Keep practicing, expanding your vocabulary, and exploring new topics to advance to the next level.