🌠 Grammar B2-21: wish / if only

The second conditional taught you that a past tense can measure distance instead of time; wish and if only turn that same machinery on your own feelings. This material sorts every wish onto one of three clocks — a situation still true this evening takes wish plus the past simple, a decision that is sealed takes wish plus the past perfect, and a repeated act by somebody else takes wish plus would — and adds wish plus could for the abilities you simply do not have. The flagship contrast is the asymmetry that makes the topic hard: you cannot wish yourself would, because would after wish complains about a choice another person keeps making, so I wish I would stop biting my nails has to become I wish I could stop. If only appears throughout as the louder twin with identical forms, and were is taught as the careful form for every person. Thirty-one multiple-choice items, a twelve-chip now-or-then sorter, six corrections and a tapped midnight monologue drill the choice, with four traps designed against the errors B2 writers actually produce.