First Certificate English Program was conceived as a ESL (English Second Language) and EFL (English First Language) application for intermediate learners of English. Indeed, if somebody intends, for example, to take the University of Cambridge First Certificate Exam, the assistance may be very helpful. The Churchill House suggests us such an aid. It remains only to decide whether we need this assistance or not.

When you see the interface of this program you can notice that it is well designed and simple to deal with, but maybe as me you'll be a little bit unpleasantly surprised that it functions only as a full screen version, that doesn't give you an opportunity to utilize simultaneously other programs.

Nevertheless, let's examine the tasks included in this program, which are supposed to help you in passing First Certificate Exam.

First of all, you should choose what you want to practice. 6 categories are proposed, they are as follows:

Quantifiers (some, all, any etc), Adverbs & Prepositions, Articles, Pronouns, Modals, tenses and other verb forms, Miscellaneous.

So, undoubtedly, all these grammar points are important while learning English.

As for me, I decided to check my knowledge concerning articles. I clicked this option and the following task was suggested to me:

"One word in this sentence is not necessary. Click on the word that should not be there"

And the next sentence appeared:

"The group is accompanied by a fresh white bread and butter".

I easily corrected this mistake by crossing out article a. But even if I knew English worse, I don't think it was a problem to find out that the error must have been connected with some article. In this way I did all other sentences without much reflection.

All other grammar points contained the same task and it became perfectly clear that if you chose the category "Pronouns", the word, which you should cross out was a pronoun.

In spite of an evident simplicity of tasks there was suggested an aid for those people who managed not to understand the answer to some question. I decided to view what kind of help is offered here. But instead of the promised grammar aid, the advertisement of screensavers and other unexpected things were presented to my attention.

It was my not very successful experience of dealing with First Certificate English Program. Maybe other users will find some advantages of such learning English, but if you really want to be prepared to your First Certificate Exam, I wouldn't recommend you to rely on this program.