Cambridge’s Grammar in Use — The Grammar Book You Can Open Anywhere

English is easy to forget when it stays outside everyday life. For a Korean learner who rarely needs to use it from one day to the next, keeping a feel for it takes deliberate practice.

The need to learn it can remain even so. English comes up at school, in university and sometimes in hiring or promotion. There are plenty of reasons to come back to it.

Grammar from a Different Starting Point

For a long time, Korean students reached for grammar manuals such as Seongmun Comprehensive English. The categories and explanations often reflected older traditions of grammar teaching. Books produced specifically for learners of English by English-language publishers gave students another way in.

Cambridge University Press publishes the Grammar in Use series for people learning English as an additional language. It was designed for reference and practice, including independent study.

One unit takes up one point of usage and gives you examples and exercises. The arrangement follows the problems a learner is likely to meet, so it can look quite different from a book organised under parts of speech and other broad categories.

Read through it once and it can seem scattered. After going back to a few units, you begin to see how related decisions fit together and where to look when you get stuck.

A Useful Map of Tense and Aspect

Traditional English courses often arrange verb forms in twelve combinations: present, past and future across simple, continuous, perfect and perfect continuous forms. That is a useful teaching map, even though grammatical accounts can describe tense and aspect in other ways.

The usual grid looks like this:

• Past simple / present simple / future simple
• Past continuous / present continuous / future continuous
• Past perfect / present perfect / future perfect
• Past perfect continuous / present perfect continuous / future perfect continuous

Choosing a Level and an Edition

The British-English sequence includes Essential Grammar in Use, English Grammar in Use and Advanced Grammar in Use. The American-English series includes Basic Grammar in Use and Grammar in Use Intermediate.

The advanced book can revisit structures from the intermediate level in finer detail. For someone who wants to reinforce the basics, there is plenty to do in the first two levels before deciding whether that extra detail will be useful.

The British and American editions share much of their approach. Presentation can differ between editions, and some examples reflect the variety of English being taught.

The subjunctive in advice and recommendations is one area where usage can differ.

A Book That Starts at the Beginning

Some grammar manuals assume the reader already understands the easiest material. That can leave a beginner unsure about the questions everyone else seems to have settled.

Grammar in Use starts with very basic patterns. An early unit may feel almost too easy. A few units later, it becomes clear how much there is to know about using those patterns well.

What Self-Study Asks of the Reader

The examples are practical, but some beginners may need more explanation than they can get from one page and a set of exercises.

A lesson or teacher can help connect the examples, especially when the explanation is itself written in English.

Working through the basic and intermediate levels can give you a strong grammar foundation. Using the language in reading, writing and conversation is how you find out which parts you can call on when you need them.

Book Information

”Grammar in Use”

Authors

Cambridge

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