English has the largest novel shelf in any language. Start at A1 with Black Beauty, end at B2 reading Austen in the original. The language of the most-printed books in human history.
English has the world's largest publishing tradition and the largest body of novels in any language. From 1700 onwards English produced more fiction than any other tongue. Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, Eliot, Hardy, Wilde, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, the Americans (Melville, Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Morrison), and the worldwide English of Achebe, Rushdie, Naipaul, Mantel. The shelf is enormous and most of it is best in the original.
English grammar is famously irregular but conceptually simple. No grammatical gender. No agreement past basic singular and plural. The conjugations are minimal (he runs vs they run, and that is mostly it). The tense system has more nuance than most languages (present perfect, past continuous, conditional), but the rules are clearly stated. The hard part is vocabulary, and reading expands it faster than any other method.
The most distinctive feature of English is the phrasal verb. Put up with, look forward to, run into, get over, take after. These are the verb forms English speakers actually use, the way Italians use ci and ne. There are about three thousand common ones. Reading is the only way to absorb them at any reasonable rate. Storica's adaptations preserve them at every level so the rhythm of natural English stays in the prose.
Don't drill grammar. Read your book. Open the reference when something genuinely stops you, not before.
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