The correct answers are Could you tell me where the bakery is?, Do you know what time they open?, and I was wondering if they sell chocolate croissants.
In indirect questions, we use standard sentence word order (Subject + Verb) instead of question word order. We do not use auxiliary verbs like do/does/did, and we do not invert the subject and the verb.
Therefore, "where the bakery is" is correct, while "where is the bakery" is incorrect in this context.
Questions
If you've ever asked You like coffee? with rising intonation and gotten a confused look — you've felt the gap between casual and grammatical English questions. Many languages form questions with intonation alone, but English usually requires inversion (Are you ready?) or do-support (Do you like coffee?). Skip the structure and your questions sound like uncertain statements.
Questions in English use inversion of subject and an auxiliary (Can she dance?) or do-support when no auxiliary is present (Does the milk go in the fridge?). Yes/no questions, wh-questions, negative questions, and tag questions all share this machinery.
Indirect speech
If you've ever tried to retell what someone said and ended up with a verb-tense mess (She said she will come — wait, would come?), you've hit indirect speech. The rules look intricate but reduce to one move: when the reporting verb is past, shift everything in the reported clause one step into the past. Master that and reporting other people's words stops being a guessing game.
Indirect speech reports what someone said without quoting them: "I like apples" → He said that he liked apples. The core mechanism is backshift — tenses retreat one step into the past — plus pronoun and time-expression shifts.
Word Order
If your first language has flexible word order — Russian, Latin, German, Japanese — English can feel rigid. You can't just rearrange words for emphasis the way you would at home; the grammar tracks position, not just inflection. Get the order wrong and the sentence either changes meaning or stops making sense.
Word order is the sequence of words in a sentence. English is an SVO language — subject, verb, object. The order of adjectives and modifiers in a noun phrase also follows fixed patterns. Get this right and your English instantly sounds more natural.
Auxiliary verb
If you've ever wondered why English asks Do you know? instead of Know you?, or how a single sentence can carry tense, aspect, AND voice (has been being cleaned), you've felt the work of auxiliary verbs. They're tiny words that quietly carry most of English's grammatical machinery — get them wrong and questions, negatives, and tenses all fall apart.
An auxiliary verb combines with a main verb to add grammatical meaning. The English auxiliaries are be, have, do, and the modal verbs (can, will, should…). They handle questions (Do you?), negation (don't), tense and aspect (has gone, is going), and passive voice (was eaten).
Clause
If you've ever been told your sentence is a "run-on" or that you've used a comma where there should be a semicolon — you've hit the limits of writing without seeing clauses. Get this concept solid and most punctuation problems quietly disappear: you can finally tell a complete thought from a fragment without guessing.
A clause is a grammatical unit built around a verb, usually with a subject and a predicate. Independent clauses stand alone (I missed the bus); dependent clauses can't (Because I overslept). Combine them and you build complex sentences.
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: Medium
If easy questions feel too obvious but hard questions leave you guessing, you're probably ready for Medium — the level where most real learning happens. It pushes just enough to expose the rules you don't quite have yet, without burying you in edge cases. This is where steady fluency is built, one well-aimed challenge at a time.
The Medium difficulty tag marks middle-range challenges — typically A2 to B1. One rule per question, realistic distractors, and contexts that require active thought rather than instant recognition.