Complete Lisa's money management sentences with the most natural word choices.
I'm trying to save money for my summer vacation. This month I need to stick to my budget more carefully. I always withdraw cash from the ATM on Fridays.
Save money - "Save money" means to keep money for future use rather than spending it.
Stick to my budget - "Stick to" means to follow something closely, especially a plan or limit.
Withdraw cash - "Withdraw" is the formal term for taking money out of your bank account.
Verb
If grammar feels overwhelming, the fix is almost always to focus on verbs first. They carry the action, the time, the mood, and the voice — a single verb form decides whether your sentence reads as past or present, fact or hypothetical, active or passive. Get verbs solid and the rest of grammar suddenly looks much smaller.
A verb expresses action, state, or occurrence — the engine of every English sentence. Most verbs have five forms (base, -s, past tense, past participle, -ing); be has eight; modal verbs have fewer. Verbs carry tense, aspect, mood, and voice.
Phrasal verb
If you've ever read I ran into my old teacher and wondered why anyone would run into a person on purpose, welcome to phrasal verbs. They're idioms hiding in plain sight — short verb-plus-particle combinations whose meanings don't match the words you see. Miss them and English films, news, and casual conversation feel half-translated.
A phrasal verb combines a verb with a particle, a preposition, or both, forming a unit with a non-literal meaning: give up, put up with, come across. They're the single biggest source of native-sounding fluency at intermediate level.
Collocations
If your English vocabulary is large but your speech still sounds slightly off — do a mistake, powerful coffee, high winds blew strongly — you've hit the collocation problem. Each word is correct in isolation, but native speakers don't pair them that way. Fixing it isn't about more vocabulary; it's about learning words in their natural company.
Collocations are word combinations that habitually occur together: make a decision, strong coffee, heavy rain, highly unlikely. The grammar permits other pairings, but fluent English consistently chooses one over the rest. They're the connective tissue of natural-sounding language.
Vocabulary for B1/Intermediate
If you can talk about your job and family in English but feel stuck the moment a conversation drifts into news, opinions, or abstract topics — you've hit the B1 vocabulary wall. The fix isn't more grammar; it's the next 1,500 words. This is the level where small talk becomes real conversation.
The B1 vocabulary tag covers vocabulary for intermediate English — roughly 2,500–4,000 words. Includes opinion and abstract vocabulary, news topics, refined emotions, and a wider range of phrasal verbs and collocations.
B1 | Intermediate
If you can hold a conversation about your weekend, explain why you're late, and follow a short news story without panicking — but still feel lost in fast or technical English — you're probably operating at B1. Knowing this matters: study material at the wrong level either bores you or burns you out, and B1 is the typical target for travel, casual work, and most everyday social English.
B1 is the intermediate level in the CEFR framework, where you handle everyday English independently and start combining ideas with complex sentences, passive voice, and modal verbs.
Difficulty: Easy
If a textbook leaves you confused, sometimes the issue isn't the topic — it's that the practice material is layered with extra complications. Filtering by Easy strips that away. You get one rule at a time, in plain everyday language, with no trick questions. It's how you make a shaky foundation solid before stacking more on top.
The Easy difficulty tag marks beginner-level questions and challenges — typically A1 or early A2. Single-rule focus, short sentences, common vocabulary, one clear correct answer.