20 Common English Mistakes and How to Fix Them

Every English learner repeats the same mistakes — not because they are careless, but because their native language transfers incorrect patterns into English. Linguists call this "negative transfer" or "L1 interference". A comprehensive 2021 analysis of 500,000 learner essays published in the journal Language Learning identified 20 errors that account for over 70 percent of all written and spoken mistakes made by non-native English speakers, particularly those from Asian language backgrounds. This guide addresses each mistake directly with a clear explanation and a corrected example.

Mistakes 1 to 5: Article and Noun Errors

Articles (a, an, the) are absent in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai, which makes them one of the highest-frequency error types for Asian learners. Mistake 1 is omitting "the" before unique nouns: say "the sun" and "the government", not "sun" and "government". Mistake 2 is using "a" before vowel sounds: it is "an apple" and "an hour" (because the "h" is silent), not "a apple" or "a hour". Mistake 3 is treating uncountable nouns as countable: "information", "advice", "furniture", and "luggage" have no plural form — you cannot say "informations" or "advices".

• Wrong: "Can you give me an advice?" — Correct: "Can you give me some advice?"
• Wrong: "I need to buy a furniture." — Correct: "I need to buy some furniture."
• Wrong: "She has many knowledges." — Correct: "She has a lot of knowledge."
• Wrong: "He is a honest person." — Correct: "He is an honest person."

Mistake 4 is confusing "much" and "many". Use "much" with uncountable nouns ("much time", "much money") and "many" with countable nouns ("many people", "many books"). Mistake 5 is the misuse of "persons" as the plural of "person" in formal writing. In modern English, "people" is the standard plural — "persons" appears only in legal documents and formal notices.

Mistakes 6 to 10: Verb Tense and Agreement Errors

Verb errors are the most visible mistakes in spoken English. Mistake 6 is omitting the third-person singular "s": you must say "she works" and "he runs", not "she work" or "he run". This error is extremely common because no other verb form changes in the present simple tense. Mistake 7 is using present simple for an action happening right now: "I am eating lunch" (present continuous), not "I eat lunch now". The present simple describes habits, facts, and routines.

• Wrong: "She don't like coffee." — Correct: "She does not like coffee."
• Wrong: "I am agree with you." — Correct: "I agree with you." (stative verbs do not use continuous form)
• Wrong: "He has been here since 3 hours." — Correct: "He has been here for 3 hours."
• Wrong: "I am knowing the answer." — Correct: "I know the answer."
• Wrong: "Since I come here, I learned a lot." — Correct: "Since I came here, I have learned a lot."

Mistake 9 is the confusion between "since" and "for". "Since" marks a specific starting point in time ("since Monday", "since 2019"), while "for" marks a duration ("for three days", "for two years"). Mistake 10 is using the wrong auxiliary in questions: English requires subject-auxiliary inversion — "Do you like this?" not "You like this?" and "Did she come?" not "She came?".

Mistakes 11 to 15: Preposition and Word Choice Errors

Prepositions have no logical rules — they must be memorised in fixed phrases. Mistake 11 is using "on" instead of "at" for specific times: "at 3 o'clock", "at noon", "at midnight". Mistake 12 is "depend of" instead of "depend on". Mistake 13 is "interested about" instead of "interested in". Mistake 14 is confusing "borrow" and "lend": you borrow something FROM someone, and you lend something TO someone. Mistake 15 is the very common confusion between "say" and "tell": you say something, but you tell someone something — "She said that she was tired" (not "she told that").

Mistakes 16 to 20: Pronunciation, Punctuation, and Register

Mistake 16 is adding extra syllables to words that end in consonant clusters: "film" is one syllable, not "fil-um". Mistake 17 is mispronouncing the "th" sound — the most difficult sound in English for most Asian speakers. Place your tongue lightly between your teeth and blow air: "think" (voiceless) and "this" (voiced). Mistake 18 is writing run-on sentences without proper punctuation, which makes formal writing very difficult to read. Mistake 19 is overusing "very" when more precise adverbs exist: use "extremely", "remarkably", or "significantly" instead. Mistake 20 is using informal contractions in formal writing — always write full forms in essays, emails, and reports.