Ask a candidate how they are preparing English and you will usually hear that they are "reading a lot" or that their English "is weak". Both answers mean the same thing: no plan.
English in a competitive paper is not general fluency. It is a narrow set of recurring question types, and almost all of them are learnable in a few weeks of deliberate work.
What is actually asked
Across PPSC, FPSC, NTS and similar papers, English questions cluster into:
- Prepositions — the most common single type
- Synonyms and antonyms
- Sentence correction — find the grammatical error
- Active and passive voice
- Direct and indirect speech (narration)
- Tenses
- Idioms and phrasal verbs
- One-word substitutions
- Spelling
- Analogies
- Reading comprehension, in longer papers
Notice how much of that is rule-based. Prepositions, voice, narration and tenses are not matters of feel — they have rules, and the rules fit on a few pages.
Grammar: finish the rules first
Give grammar two weeks and treat it as something to complete, not to absorb.
Prepositions. There is no logic to learn, only usage. Study them in verb + preposition pairs — depend on, insist on, accused of, capable of, suffer from — and drill the pairs. Trying to reason out which preposition "sounds right" fails under time pressure.
Active and passive voice. Learn the transformation for each tense once. It is a mechanical conversion, and once the table is in your head the questions become free marks.
Narration. Same: the rules for changing tense, pronouns and time expressions are fixed. Learn the table, then practise.
Tenses. Know the twelve forms and what each is for. Most questions test whether you can tell two neighbouring tenses apart.
Sentence correction. The errors repeat: subject-verb agreement, wrong preposition, misused article, wrong tense sequence, double comparative, misplaced modifier. Learn the list of common errors and look for them directly instead of reading for a general sense of wrongness.
Vocabulary: the part that actually moves marks
Grammar is finite and quick. Vocabulary is where candidates are separated, and where most of them go wrong by trying to learn word lists.
What works better:
- Learn in pairs and groups. A word with its synonym and its antonym together is three times the recall value of a word alone.
- Twenty a day, revised — not two hundred read once. Spacing is what moves a word into memory; volume is not.
- Keep your own list, built from words you actually met and missed. A list of words someone else chose is far less memorable than one you collected.
- Learn roots and affixes once you have a base. Bene-, mal-, circum-, -phobia, -cide: a single root unlocks a cluster of words and lets you make an educated guess at a word you have never seen.
- Say the word in a sentence. A word you have only recognised is not a word you can distinguish from its near-synonym under pressure.
Idioms and one-word substitutions
Both are pure memorisation with no rules to fall back on, which makes them ideal for short daily revision rather than long sessions. Ten idioms a day for a month is three hundred idioms.
A four-week plan
- Week 1: Tenses, voice, narration. Rules first, then questions.
- Week 2: Prepositions, drilled as pairs. Begin daily vocabulary.
- Week 3: Sentence correction and common errors. Idioms and one-word substitutions daily. Continue vocabulary.
- Week 4: Past questions under time. Revise only what you missed.
Vocabulary continues every day throughout, and afterwards.
Practise here
Attempt English questions on this site in quiz mode so you commit to an answer before seeing the correct one — with grammar especially, recognising the right answer after the fact creates a false sense of readiness.
Start at the subject index or search for a topic such as "preposition" or "synonym".