What are the mistakes you used to make when learning English?

[Happytofita]

Hello,

How are you? I am just fine.

I want to know the mistakes you used to make (or still making) while learning English. Mistakes that stem from the interferance of your first language. For example, Arab learners of English would say something like: the girl amazing! instead of the girl is amazing. Because there is no verb that expresses the verb to be in the present tense in Arabic.

What about you? Could you please share your experiences?

Thank you in advance.

: o)

[SkiIucK]

Hello Mouhcine,

I'm okay; studying for state exams. Glad you're doing fine yourself.

I often face difficulty when using prepositions. Also, some idiomatic phrases give me a hard time.

That's for now.

Take care,

Dimitar

[Happytofita]

Hello Dimitar,

Good luck! Study hard.:D

[Shyone]

I still often emphasize the wrong syllables, just like I was speaking German.
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[Happytofita]

[Jamie (K)]

One of the hardest mistakes for foreigners from many countries to fix is not using an auxiliary verb when asking questions, as in, "What he said?" or, "Where he went?"

One big problem for Arabs is that they don't know the difference between "too much" and "a lot of", so they'll say, "This man does too much for the poor." It sounds like they're criticizing him and want him to help the poor less.

Arabs also translate some expressions directly into English even though they don't make any sense. A common one is when they say that someone has "colored eyes". This is nonsense in English, because all eyes have some kind of color. Some are black, some are brown, some are blue, green, gray, hazel. All eyes are colored eyes.

When I was a very small child learning English (as my first language), I sometimes put the R sound at the ends of words that shouldn't have it. The reason was that at that time there were still some American TV announcers who had non-rhotic accents, as the British do, or as low-class people in Boston and New York do. So when I would hear one of them say a word like "lozenges", for example, I thought that the singular was "lozenger" and the plural was "lozengers", and that the speaker had just left out the R because of his accent.

[Jamilion]

Hi.

I have been learning English for four years only.. now I'm thanking God because I didn't know that English is not easy language .. because if I had known that , I didn't put my first step on the way to learn it.

as to the difficulties that I'm facing in this language, I think they don't need explanations. You can read any sentence that I wrote to find out them.
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We are always looking for a miracle but the things we are used to seeing are more miraculous than those we are looking for.

[Kitosdad]

Jam, that was a funny post outlining your frustration. Console yourself by thinking just how much better you are today, than you would be if you were only starting to learn.
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Keep it simple ... Keep it interesting.

[MariaEbb]

I have found out that I make linguistic mistakes instaed of grammar mistakes. Now I make typos too as I can't spellcheck my writing. I got an essay corrected by an Englishman on the net. He found no grammar mistakes like tense errors or errors with prepositions.
/Maria

[Jamie (K)]

Maria, grammar mistakes are a type of linguistic mistake. What sort of linguistic mistake are you talking about? Any mistake in language is a linguistic mistake.

[MariaEbb]

I thought it was two differant types of mistakes. If I write "I get my dog ten years ago" that is a grammar mistake. But if I write for example " I was to town yesterday", someone may think it is a linguistic mistake. Maybe they would say, "Yesterday I was to town.

/Maria

[Jamie (K)]

Those are all linguistic mistakes. The only mistake in, "I was to town yesterday," and, "Yesterday I was to town," is the use of the preposition "to" instead of "in".

[Skrej]