25 of the Best Resources to Learn English Grammar Online [2023] | FluentU English

learn english grammar online

25 of the Best Resources to Learn English Grammar Online [2023]

Learning English grammar is important, but it’s not always easy to know where to start.

Where can you get all the information you need and how can you learn all of the rules (and the exceptions to these rules)?

I’ve been an English teacher for almost 20 years, so I know there’s a difference between knowing English grammar and mastering it.

Here’s a list of 25 English grammar websites, including tutorials, video courses and exercises that cover practically every important grammar topic out there! 

Contents

Learn English Grammar

These websites give you helpful explanations about major grammar points:  

Best for Grammar Rules: Grammarly Handbook

Is it free? Yes.

Level: Advanced

learn english grammar online

Description: You may have heard of the Grammarly spelling and grammar checker. It doesn’t just check your mistakes in your writing, but will also explain them to you so you don’t make the same mistakes again.

They’ve also collected a ton of rules, facts and tips on every possible grammar topic you can imagine, and put them together in a handbook.

The topics are arranged clearly, so you can easily find out what you need to know about using adverbs, commas and capital letters. The Grammarly Handbook even covers more difficult topics like English idioms and passive voice.

Explanations are written in a blog-like way: personal and in full paragraphs instead of a few lines. Because of this, it’s a fantastic resource for more advanced learners.

Grammarly isn’t an English learner website—it’s a website for native English speakers who want to improve their grammar. Because of that, the tips might be a bit overwhelming for beginner/intermediate learners.

Best for Extensive Examples: Education First

Is it free? Yes.

Level: All levels

learn english grammar online

Description: Education First’s Grammar Guide is very well organized and is a good starting place to learn how to use parts of speech. The rules themselves are short and use many example sentences to show how everything works.

The Grammar Guide doesn’t include exercises, so you will need to practice with another resource. If you learn better through examples than through rules, this is an excellent place to start.

On top of this, Education First includes other free English resources, including an English proficiency test, a list of common English idioms and vocabulary lists by frequency.

Best for Organized Lessons: EnglishClub

Is it free? Yes.

Level: Beginner and intermediate

learn english grammar online

Description: EnglishClub is another website with grammar lessons, and the writing on this one is friendly and super easy to understand.

Some lessons have quizzes, and others have special tips that explain commonly misunderstood facts about each topic.

Best for British English: British Council

Is it free? Yes.

Level: All levels

learn english grammar online

Description: The British Council is a great resource for all language learners, especially if you’re learning British English. There’s a huge amount of information here about any kind of grammar you may need to know.

Just choose your level and then you’ll get several specific grammar topics to explore. There are lots of practice exercises for each topic. You can also take tests to find out your level of English fluency.

Best Podcast: Grammar Girl

Is it free? Yes.

Level: Intermediate and advanced

learn english grammar online

Description: Grammar Girl is both a blog and a podcast that provides short, friendly tips to improve the grammar in your writing. Grammar Girl (also known as Mignon Fogarty) makes learning grammar fun and simple with memory tricks. Her “Quick and Dirty Tips” make it easier to remember and use difficult grammar rules.

Grammar Girl is used by native speakers as well, so you can be sure it’ll help your English sound more natural. You’ll learn about English grammar rules as well as punctuation, writing style and even business tips.

You can find her podcasts on Apple and Spotify, or you can get a free month when you sign up with the code GRAMMAR using Stitcher.

Best for Short Courses: Alison English Grammar Courses

Is it free? Yes, with a Premium option.

Level: All levels

learn english grammar online

Description: Not everybody likes to learn alone. For those of you who’d prefer to learn in a classroom, you might want to try an online course. Alison has a number of free online courses for learning English grammar. These courses usually involve watching videos and then doing assignments.

The best part is that you can often interact with (talk to) the other students and the teacher. So if you have a question or want to practice with someone, you can.

Best for Advanced Courses: edX

Is it free? Yes.

Level: Upper-intermediate and advanced 

learn english grammar online

Description: If you’ve never heard about edX and its MOOCs, you’re missing one of the best ways of learning English grammar online for free!

MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course which are courses that you can do online, mostly for free. They’re prepared by world-famous institutions and universities such as Oxford or Cambridge, and allow you to learn from home at your own pace.

edX is a platform that offers thousands of free MOOCs on many different topics. When it comes to learning English grammar, you can choose from several courses depending on your needs.

There are two courses I really recommend from this site:

1. Upper-intermediate English: Technology Today. This course is perfect for upper-intermediate learners who want to learn vocabulary and grammar related to technology. The main goal is to teach you how to write a business plan through English grammar lessons that revolve around technology and business.

2. Upper-intermediate English: Modern Life. If you want to improve your English grammar and vocabulary skills with the help of topics such as sports, health, movies, pets and more, this MOOC is perfect for you. This course is also amazing if you don’t know exactly how to improve your English grammar and want to break the intermediate plateau.

If you’d like a paid certificate to show what you’ve learned, edX also offers those.

Best for Quick Lessons: English Grammar 101

Is it free? No.

Level: Intermediate

learn english grammar online

Description: Do you prefer learning with a textbook, but don’t want to carry one around all the time? You’ll love English Grammar 101, which is set up like a grammar textbook.

Each easy-to-understand lesson (or chapter) only covers one topic at a time and is followed by an exercise section to test your understanding of the topic. The short length of the chapters means you can spend a few minutes a day on one grammar rule, and learn a lot within just a short time.

Best for Visual Learners: YouTube

Is it free? Yes.

Level: All levels

learn english grammar online

Description: Visual learners, we haven’t forgotten about you! For those of you who prefer to watch someone explain the rules instead of reading them, YouTube has plenty of lessons to offer.

Some great English grammar lessons can be found on English with Ronnie, Let’s Talk and many other channels. For lessons on something specific, search YouTube for “[topic] grammar lesson” and you’ll find many options.

Practice English Grammar

These websites focus on exercises and quizzes so you can apply what you’ve learned about English grammar:

Best for Comprehensive Exercises: Englisch Hilfen (English Help)

Is it free? Yes.

Level: All levels

learn english grammar online

Description: This German site is available in two versions, a German one and an English one. We’re trying to learn English grammar here, so I recommend you only use the English version.

Englisch Hilfen contains everything a learner of English will ever need. It includes amazing grammar explanations and exercises, and access to everything is completely free.

Just choose a topic from the list on the left side of the screen and start learning!

When you choose a topic, you’ll land on a webpage where all the available links related to that topic have been put together. The different links are normally arranged according to how you should learn the topic or by increasing difficulty.

At the end of the list of grammar links, you’ll also find links that’ll take you to the exercises on that topic. The site is very user-friendly and easy to use.

Best for Grammar from Native Speakers: FluentU

Is it free? No, but there’s a free trial you can use to try out all the videos and features.

Level: All levels

Description: FluentU helps you learn grammar through authentic videos—things like popular music videos, movie clips and street interviews—with interactive captions. When you click on a word, you’ll see its definition and example sentences, along with grammar tips.

After watching, you can review your English grammar with personalized quizzes based on each video clip. These have fill-in-the-blanks, multiple choice and even speaking questions (where you have to talk out loud to answer):

The videos come in bite-sized snippets, so you could watch several in one sitting and pick up a lot of grammar points naturally, instead of having to memorize rules.

Best for Textbook-Style Exercises: Oxford Practice Grammar Online

Is it free? Yes. 

Level: All levels

english-grammar-exercises-online

Description: The Oxford University Press website offers English grammar exercises in three levels: basic, intermediate and advanced. 

Each level includes many grammar exercises, a section focusing on listening and speaking and another section targeting reading and writing. There are also useful links that take you to other Oxford language learning resources.

The English grammar exercises come in various formats, such as multiple-choice questions or putting words in the right order. Each task can cover a few grammatical matters at that level.

Best for Beginners: Passport To English

Is it free? Yes.

Level: All levels

learn english grammar online

Description: Passport To English is a complete English course that starts from zero and teaches you English through vocabulary exercises, English grammar lessons, dictations, games, listening and reading exercises.

If what you need is a complete English course, start with the first English grammar lesson of the Beginning English level and follow the detailed instructions as you go on.

Passport To English is also an awesome site if you only want to improve your current English grammar level.

The list of grammar topics is alphabetical and it includes every grammar bit covered in the lessons of the course (you can see the level and the lesson number where each grammar topic appears in the course).

Passport To English is not only well-organized, but it also includes great explanations and a lot of examples. At the end of each topic, you have several exercises to check what you have learned.

Best for Intermediate Learners: EnglishGrammar

Is it free? Yes.

Level: Intermediate and advanced 

english-grammar-exercises-online

Description: The online exercise section of the EnglishGrammar website covers various English parts of speech, including adjectives, adverbs, nouns, prepositions, pronouns and more. You will also have a chance to improve your writing skills with correct punctuation and spelling.

Once you choose a topic, you will be redirected to a page with a brief explanation and some multiple-choice questions. Each time you answer a question, you get an instant result whether you are right or wrong. It is a fast, easy and efficient way to strengthen your grammar knowledge.

Best for Verb Tenses: English Page

Is it free? Yes.

Level: Intermediate and advanced learners

learn english grammar online

Description: English Page isn’t organized as well as some of the other websites on this list, but it has some of the best English grammar exercises you’ll find. The exercises here don’t just ask you to choose a correct answer from a list—you have to write the answer yourself.

This gets you to actually use what you have learned and to practice instead of just memorizing. There’s an excellent section with grammar rules as well, with lots of sample sentences.

Best for Conditionals and Subjunctives: EGO4U

Is it free? Yes.

Level: Beginner and intermediate

learn english grammar online

Description: If you want to learn English grammar online absolutely for free, you have to try the EGO4U (English Grammar Online) site.

This page includes everything you need to improve your English grammar online, from an overview of all tenses with examples to a ton of English grammar lessons and exercises on tenses, the conditionals and even the mysterious English subjunctive.

EGO4U also has the most important English grammar topics divided into separate sections so you don’t get lost when trying to learn something new. Each section includes grammar lessons and a lot of exercises for you to practice. 

Finally, EGO4U includes an amazing section where you can find the most confusing English tenses. If you’re having a problem distinguishing between the past simple and the past progressive, or you get a headache every time you need to decide if a sentence needs going to, will, the present simple or the present progressive, you’re going to love this section.

Best for Parts of Speech: My English Pages

Is it free? Yes.

Level: All levels

learn english grammar online

Description: My English Pages is an online free resource that’ll help you improve your English grammar at any level.

I love how all the different topics are divided into big sections. You have tenses, parts of speech, modal verbs, determiners, clauses…the list goes on and on! So if you don’t know how to improve your English grammar, start here!

For each topic, you’ll find a great grammar lesson or explanation with lots of examples, and at the end of the explanation, there are links where you can practice the grammar you just learned.

Best for Improving Writing: GrammarBook

Is it free? Yes, with more quizzes available if you subscribe.

Level: All levels 

learn english grammar online

GrammarBook is an excellent source for studying grammar and punctuation. It has hundreds of quizzes that you can order separately or in a bundle with a subscription. Besides, you can make use of the many free interactive grammar quizzes.

They cover topics like parts of speech, subject and verb agreement and the most confusing words in English.

The extra value of the quizzes on GrammarBook is their focus on writing in English. You can test your skills with interactive exercises about punctuation and capitalization. These quizzes will prepare you for written English communications in the real world like college essays, cover letters or business proposals.

Best for Visual Examples: LEO Network

Is it free? Yes.

Level: All levels

learn english grammar online

Description: I discovered the LEO Network by accident a couple of months ago, and I haven’t stopped using it with my students since then.

LEO allows you to learn vocabulary, chat with other learners, improve your writing skills, get better at dictations, take spelling tests…I’d need a whole post to name all the great stuff you can do on this site.

The grammar section is also amazing, and I’m sure you’ll fall in love with it, too.

Each category and topic includes from one to three little symbols on the right. These symbols tell you what you’ll be able to do for each topic.

The notebook symbol (Read This!) means that when you click, you’ll find a grammar explanation. The grammar explanations in the LEO Network can seem rather short, but they’re accurate and focus on what’s important. You know you won’t be learning anything unnecessary.

The picture symbol (Picture This!) means that when you click, you’ll find cute little pictures and tons of examples related to the grammar topic. This is the perfect section to see the grammar in action.

Finally, the tick symbol inside a circle (Test This!) means that when you click, you’ll have a test or an exercise so you can practice the grammar you learned. This is where the magic happens, and where you can see if you really understood the topic or if you need to review it.

Best for Commonly Confused Words: 5 Minute English

Is it free? Yes.

Level: Beginner and intermediate

learn english grammar online

Description: The design for 5 Minute English might not be very fancy, but its explanations are clear and to the point. The site has some great information about common grammar questions and mistakes, like this page, which explains when to use “listen” and when to use “hear.”

In addition to the grammar explanations, you can find lessons on vocabulary, pronunciation, English slang and idioms, reading and listening.

Best for Step-by-Step Exercises: Daily Grammar

Is it free? Yes.

Level: Beginners and intermediate

learn english grammar online

Description: Daily Grammar is simple both in look and content. The website has over 400 lessons on parts of speech and parts of sentences, which you can go through in order, or you can use the glossary to look up a term.

Daily Grammar also posts lessons to their blog, along with exercises for practice.

If you’d like even more practice, there are also Daily Grammar e-textbooks and e-workbooks you can buy.

Best for Regularly Updated Quizzes: Grammar Bytes

Is it free? Yes.

Level: Intermediate

learn english grammar online

Description: Grammar Bytes has bite-sized (mini) grammar lessons and exercises presented in a really friendly and sometimes silly way. Interactive exercises let you test your skills, and they also contain easy-to-understand explanations with the correct answers.

In addition to the exercises, Grammar Bytes gives you grammar rules for quick reference, plus a glossary of grammar terms.

Grammar Bytes has pages that you can print out. These are helpful if you want to do the exercises by hand—or make a copy of grammar rules that you can keep handy.

The site also posts a weekly grammar workout on its Twitter account.

Best for Fill-in-the-Blank Quizzes: Perfect English Grammar

Is it free? Yes.

Level: Intermediate and advanced

learn english grammar online

Description: On the Perfect English Grammar website, you can find online exercises on many grammatical topics. In particular, if you struggle with tenses in English, this is a great site for you. Not only will you practice individual tenses, but this site also has “mixed” quizzes to help you identify the correct tense in different contexts.

When you come to the website for practicing, just pick one topic from the list and follow the link to the exercise page. You will be required to fill in the blank with your answer and you can check if it is correct or not right away. The simplicity of the exercise format makes it easier to practice more and more.

If you are unsure about a particular grammar rule, you might be able to learn more about it under the explanations tab.

Best for Multiple-Choice Quizzes: UsingEnglish.com

Is it free? Yes.

Level: All levels

english-grammar-exercises-online

UsingEnglish.com has an extensive collection of free English language quizzes so that you can practice various issues in grammar, word usage and vocabulary. The tests are available for learners of all levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced.

Quizzes are in the form of multiple-choice questions and you will receive a score once you finish with all the items. The answer keys are also available at a click.

With UsingEnglish, you can practice with a few specific topics under a broader grammar topic. For example, when learning about adjectives and adverbs, you can choose to do some exercises about individual words or about the position of adverbs in a sentence.

With each quiz, you can see the number of questions and the level of difficulty. That way, you will know how long it might take and whether it is suitable for you before starting the test.

There are also many quizzes on vocabulary so that you can speak and write in English not only grammatically correct but also naturally.

Best for Multiple Exercises per Topic: first-english

Is it free? Yes.

Level: All levels

Description: first-english is a website dedicated solely to English grammar exercises online. It is entirely free for you to learn and improve your English.

The grammar exercises cover all standard grammar topics, from tenses to different types of speech. Each theme comes with several fill-in-the-blank activities as well as multiple choice items focusing on smaller matters within the same subject. There is either a short explanation of the rule or a “Help” button that gives you a hint for the correct answer, in case you find an activity somewhat tricky.

As the website is only for online English grammar exercises, there is no distraction. You can focus on practicing with simple, straightforward tasks and move from one topic to another.

Smart Steps for Learning English Grammar

Even with a list of great resources, learning will be easier if you follow specific steps.

1. Have a goal. Having a goal helps you create focus. Choose a specific goal for your grammar learning, such as feeling comfortable for a job interview, or fixing your spoken mistakes in the past tense.

2. Break that goal down into smaller goals. Now that you know what you want to achieve, you can figure out how to get there.

Let’s say that you want to fix your past tense mistakes. First, you’ll need to figure out what those mistakes are. To do that, you can ask others to point out your mistakes when you speak, record yourself and listen carefully, work on the past tenses you’re less familiar with and more.

Whatever you’re working on, you should find a way to break it down into smaller chunks.

3. Focus on one topic at a time. Don’t try to learn everything at once. Instead, learn one rule at a time and practice, using and reviewing that rule until you know it so well that you could teach it to someone else.

4. Study for a few minutes each day. You don’t need to study for hours to learn English. All it takes is five to 10 minutes a day, as long as you use them wisely.

Each day, you can read a grammar rule, do a few exercises and then practice it for the rest of the day. In the next couple of days, use that rule while writing and speaking to make sure you didn’t forget it. Look for examples of that rule while you read, watch or listen to anything in English.

 

Hopefully, you’ve found a couple of sites that you’re excited to start using. Remember to use these websites together with other English learning methods.

Good luck!