S.O.S. Grammar
The grammar questions Academy members actually ask — 24 audio lessons with full transcripts, MP3s and quizzes.
Taught by Peter Smissen
or
- 5 hr 4 min of content
- 24 lessons
- Certificate of completion
- Full lifetime access
$129.00
Course Content
16 sections · 24 lessons
What you'll be able to do
- Explain how tense, aspect, mood and voice combine to form any English tense
- Choose confidently between the simple, progressive, perfect and perfect-progressive aspects
- Use the present perfect and the past perfect without second-guessing yourself
- Switch between active and passive voice, and know when the passive is the better choice
- Build clear sentences with clauses, correct question word order, and conditional inversions
- Stop guessing with articles — a, an, the and the zero article
- Pick the right preposition after verbs, nouns and adjectives
- Sound polite and appropriately formal using would, shall, should and the subjunctive
Who is this for?
Intermediate learners and above (roughly B1 and up). You'll get the most out of this course if you already use English day to day and want to understand why the grammar works the way it does, rather than meet it for the first time. No linguistics background needed — every term is explained in plain English as it comes up.
About this course
S.O.S. Grammar is the rescue course for the grammar that keeps tripping you up. Every lesson comes from a real question — each month, lessons are built around what Academy members say they want to understand. So instead of marching through a textbook syllabus, you work through the problems learners actually get stuck on.
The approach is to teach the system behind English grammar, not a list of rules to memorise. Once you see how tense, aspect, mood and voice fit together, even the long tenses like "will have been waiting" stop being mysterious.
What's inside
24 audio lessons:
- The English verb system — tense, aspect, mood and voice, and how they combine to build every tense in English.
- Aspect in depth — the simple, progressive, perfect and perfect-progressive aspects, one lesson each.
- Tense — including the future, the future perfect, and combining tense with aspect.
- Voice — active and passive, and when each one actually sounds natural.
- Sentence structure — clauses, direct question structure, and conditional inversions like "Had I known…".
- The small words that cause the most mistakes — articles, prepositions of time and place, and dependent prepositions.
- Meaning and register — the many uses of would, shall vs should, the English subjunctive, and ways to be polite.
- A writing task on the present perfect vs the past perfect, so you use the grammar instead of only reading about it.
How each lesson works
- Listen and read together. Play the lesson in the built-in player and follow the full transcript, line by line.
- Study anywhere. Download the MP3 and the PDF transcript for the train, the gym or your commute.
- Check yourself. Most lessons finish with a quiz, so you find out whether the grammar really landed.
Tip: these explanations are easiest to follow with the PDF transcript open beside you.
How to use the course
Lessons 1–5 build the foundation — the verb system, tense, aspect and voice — so it's worth doing those in order. After that, treat the course as a reference library: jump straight to articles, prepositions, the subjunctive or whatever is giving you trouble right now.
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