General English
Adults and older students who want to actually use English — at work, online, while travelling, or in study — and are not preparing for an exam
3 hours reading + 3 hours of challenges
دورة لاستعمال الإنجليزية في العمل والسفر والدراسة، لا للاستعداد لاختبار، وينتهي كل درس بشيء تقوله أو تكتبه لإنسان حقيقي. الدورة كاملة مجانية، ولإظهار الشرح بالعربية أدِّ اختبار تحديد المستوى القصير في صفحة /english/ar.
General English is an online course for adults and older students who want to use English in ordinary life rather than sit an exam. It covers everyday grammar, high-frequency vocabulary, real listening, speaking without freezing, and practical writing, and every module ends in a task done with a real person.
For the learner who has studied English for years and still freezes when someone speaks to them. Twenty modules on the grammar that carries ordinary conversation, the few hundred words that do most of the work, and how to listen, speak, read and write in real situations, including recorded listening practice and speaking practice with feedback. Every module ends in something you say or write to a real person.
What you'll be able to do
- Understand why years of study did not produce speech, and what changes that
- Build correct English sentences instead of translating word by word
- Handle the tenses that carry almost every ordinary conversation
- Learn the few hundred words that cover most of everyday English, and stop collecting rare ones
- Follow real speech, with its contractions and squashed words, rather than textbook recordings
- Speak past the moment of freezing, and keep going after a mistake
- Practise on real recordings and record your own answers for feedback, inside the course, before trying them on a real person
- Write a message, an email and a form in the right register
- Keep improving after the course, with a habit that survives having no teacher
Modules in this course
Studying a language and using one are different activities. Almost every school teaches the first, and speaking comes only from the second.
8 min read
Translating word by word from Arabic produces two errors so reliably that fixing them changes how you sound immediately.
9 min read
English has twelve tense forms and ordinary talk uses four of them most of the time. Learn those four properly and stop worrying about the rest.
9 min read
The small words that mark a speaker as non-native more reliably than any vocabulary gap, and that respond quickly to attention.
8 min read
A few hundred plain words cover most of everyday English. Learning rare ones while these stay unpractised is the classic way to stay silent.
8 min read
Native speakers do not say words separately. Once you know what they actually do to them, the speed stops being the problem.
9 min read
The pause before you speak is not a vocabulary problem. It is a decision problem, and it can be removed deliberately.
9 min read
Fluency is not knowing more words. It is getting more out of the words you already have.
8 min read
Reading is the cheapest way to keep improving after a course ends, and the habit dies at the dictionary.
8 min read
Most English an adult actually writes is short and practical. It is also the easiest thing to get right, because you have time.
8 min read
Ordinary spoken English runs on them, they cannot be worked out from their parts, and there is a short list that covers most of it.
8 min read
Grammatically perfect English can still sound rude. What carries politeness in English is not what carries it in Arabic.
8 min read
Most conversation is a story about yesterday or a plan for tomorrow. Two structures cover nearly all of it.
8 min read
Without a teacher, correction has to come from you. Most learners repeat a small number of errors, and finding yours is a one-evening job.
8 min read
Module 6 explained what real speech does to words. This module plays some. One recording, one hearing, and three details to catch, the way a real call works.
9 min read
One voice, no chance to ask, and a detail that gets corrected halfway through. Two recordings of the kind of English you meet in stations, airports and streets.
8 min read
The most repeated thing you will ever say in English, rehearsed until it costs no attention. Record it here and get feedback on the words before you say it to a person.
8 min read
A short story about something real, in the past tense, with four beats and a handful of linking words. Most conversation is this, and it is the first place a learner's grammar is tested at speed.
8 min read
Listen to a colleague ask you something, then answer it. The reply has to fit what was actually said, which is the one thing a rehearsed speech can never do.
9 min read
The course ends and nothing external replaces it. What continues to work, what quietly does not, and how to tell the difference.
8 min read
One real use of English every day for thirty days, logged in a single line each, with an honest account of what went wrong and what changed.
180 min to build
Questions before you start
- How long does this course take?
- About 3 hours of reading, plus roughly 3 hours across the 1 challenge. Most of that time is the challenge, at your own pace.
- Do I need any experience first?
- No formal prerequisites — every course is written to be readable from the first lesson, and that lesson is open to read before you sign up, so you can check it's pitched right for you.
- How is the certificate issued?
- Automatically, the moment you complete every module and challenge. No review queue to wait on.
- What does it cost?
- Nothing. The whole course, including the certificate, is free with a Course Parse account. There is no subscription and no card to enter.