A familiar story: the rule has been read, the exercise completed, yet the phrase remains elusive in conversation. The reason is usually simple — exercises present phrases with unfamiliar words, and the skill remains tied to them. Here, it’s the opposite: grammar is practiced using your own vocabulary — the words you’re already learning.
What to Learn First
Textbooks present grammar as a long list, often leading to frustration. In practice, the effectiveness varies greatly: a few topics cover almost all everyday speech, while less common constructions may take years to master without frequent exposure. Start with what works in every sentence:
- Word Order — subject, verb, object. In English, it is strict and replaces cases.
- Articles — a, an, the and their absence.
- Four Tenses — Present Simple, Present Continuous, Past Simple, Present Perfect.
- Question and Negation — auxiliary verbs do, does, did.
- Irregular Verbs — a hundred common triplets.
This set is enough to talk about yourself, your past, and future plans. The rest — prepositions, conditional clauses, passive voice — can be learned through reading and listening as patterns become familiar.
Word Order and Articles
Russian allows for flexible word order: “the boy reads a book” and “a book is read by the boy” convey the same meaning, with endings providing clues. English, however, has no endings, and meaning is determined by position: the boy reads a book and a book reads the boy express entirely different ideas, with the latter being nonsensical. Thus, the structure “who → what does → what” should be practiced until it becomes instinctive.
Articles are particularly challenging for Russian speakers simply because they don’t exist in the native language. The principle is straightforward: a and an are used when the item is one of many and the listener is unfamiliar with it, while the is used when the subject is clear. Compare: I bought a car (any car, mentioned for the first time) and the car is red (the specific one already mentioned). The rule can be grasped in a minute, but automatic use develops only after encountering hundreds of examples — this is precisely what is practiced with fill-in-the-blank cards.
Tenses Without Tables
The twelve tenses in a table can be intimidating, but they revolve around two questions: when does the action occur and how is it presented — as a fact, as a process, or as a result. Present Simple describes regularity (I work every day), Present Continuous describes what is happening right now (I am working), Past Simple describes a completed event in the past (I worked yesterday), and Present Perfect describes a past action relevant to the present (I have worked here for a year).
The last tense is particularly tricky for Russian speakers, as there is no separate form in Russian: “I have been working here for a year” can cover both I work and I have worked. This is better understood through exposure — countless real-life examples where the choice is obvious based on context.
Irregular verbs should be learned in the same way. A table with a hundred and eighty lines is hard to memorize, while groups by sound similarity are quite manageable: go–went–gone, see–saw–seen, take–took–taken. After that, frequent common words in sentences help recall the form naturally.
Exercises Instead of Rote Learning
Below are both modules, explaining how they work within the app. Try them out right here:
The rule you read will stay in memory for a couple of days. The rule you’ve applied twenty times becomes a skill. The only question is what material will you use to practice it.
A typical online exercise is designed like this: a bank of ready-made tasks by topic. Present Simple has twenty sentences about Tom going to school; articles have thirty about a cat on a rug. Tasks are completed, checkmarks are placed, but in your own speech, the structure still doesn’t come up: the skill has become attached to foreign words and situations. Hence the familiar feeling of “I know the grammar, but I can’t speak it.”
| Typical Exercise | Grammar in Memofluent |
|---|---|
| Pre-written sentence bank | Sentences from your own cards |
| Foreign vocabulary | Words that you are already learning |
| Complete a topic — forget it | Spaced repetition brings back challenging material |
| Fixed order of topics | Grammar follows your vocabulary |
Therefore, it makes sense to practice grammar not separately from words but using the same words: one word is removed from a sentence, and you need to fill in the correct form. This exercise encourages you to recall both the word and the surrounding grammar simultaneously.
In Memofluent, this mode works with your own deck: the app takes sentences from your cards and hides a word in them, while spaced repetition brings back difficult areas more frequently than easy ones. No separate textbook is required — grammar improves with the material that genuinely interests you.
For English, the app features two modules, exactly what the language needs: “Fill in the Blanks” — placing a word in the correct form within a living sentence, and “Word Order” — assembling a phrase from mixed parts. The latter addresses the primary feature of English mentioned above: meaning is determined by the position of the word, not by endings.
Languages with rich morphology require more modules. German has six — covering conjugation, articles, plural forms, and cases following prepositions; French and Spanish have five. English doesn’t require extra modules: it has few changeable forms, and they are all covered by the same fill-in-the-blanks exercises.
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