Clear Conditionals Explanation Conditionals is one of the most complicated grammar topics in English. And in my humble opinion, the root cause of complications is a weird way of conditional types classification. I have been learning English for a long time and I always returned to conditionals, because I couldn’t understand them at subconscious level. I tried to use as many sources as possible. I read grammar books, watched tons of videos, and consulted with teachers. Although using as many sources as possible helped me many times to gain insight, nothing could help me to grab conditionals. These type-0, type-1 stuff always confused me. What does the number mean in that classification? It doesn’t make any sense at all! But recently I watched another video about conditionals, and something clicked inside my head immediately. And the reason was a different angle that the creator of the video used to explain the topic. According to the video, there are only 2 types of conditionals: real and unreal. And you can use the both types in 3 tenses: past, present and future. We can notice that by simple multiplication of the numbers we get 6 types of conditionals overall. It is a little bit more than in the standard classification. It’s happening simply because we use similar structures in different tenses. I’ve created a table with structures and examples. An interesting fact is that in Russian language we use identical tenses in present-unreal. “Если бы я выпил (прошедшее) кофе сейчас, то чувствовал(прошедшее) себя хорошо”. And it’s not surprising because English and Russian are Indo-European languages and we have a lot in common. I hope someone finds it helpful on their way to English proficiency. As for me, I can’t understand why conditionals are not explained in that way. And I think that if I had watched that video in the beginning of my English journey, I could have avoided a tremendous amount of errors and misunderstanding. Link to the video (Russian): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0FGRYmscp8

The best methods to learn English There are a lot of methods of learning a language. Majority of teachers think that the best way to learn a language is to speak it. Maybe you’ve seen a lot of courses where someone promises you to be fluent in 1-30 days or similar. There is also a contrary opinion that in order to master a language you should spend 30 years. I read an interesting comment on one forum today. The author has written that everyone language learner should remove his rose-colored glasses and understand one simple thing. And the thing is that even after several years of hard learning you won’t be able to watch movies freely and understand everything for 100%. You won’t be able to speak fluently like a native speaker. And there is no any magic pill to do this. But what the majority of teachers doesn’t say to you is that to read freely non-adapted literature is an easy reachable skill. Moreover this skill doesn’t require any teacher at all. It’s very hard to find a teacher who tells this thing to you because most of them are biased to teach you how to speak fluently for 30 days. So the author advises to start from reading and focus your time on this skill. Posts like this hinder me from learning my target language. They also make me sad and reduce my motivation to learn. So right now I’m looking for a great source of motivation and think about an optimization of my learning approach. Also I got an advice today from one great teacher to try notebooks here on iTalki. He also mentioned that in order to master a language I should practice in all directions: reading, writing, listening, speaking and thinking. I had been focused on speaking and listening only before I had today’s lesson. So I’ve decided to start reading a fiction book and may be you can suggest me something to start with. And this is my first attempt to write a notebook here and I hope it goes well. Thank you for your kind attention!