Common mistakes made by Spanish speakers that are learning English

When you a learning a new language, everybody makes mistakes at some point and they are normally the same mistakes. The fun part of learning is to make mistakes and learn from them.

  1. Missing subject: This mistake happens because in Spanish it isn't always necessary. However, in English, it is! You must specify the subect. For example: "It is very important to brush your teeth, NOT "Is very important to brush your teeth".
  2. Not using the present perfect: This mistake happens because of the different sentence construction in Spanish. When we talk about how long we have been doing something in English, we say: "I have been living in Spain for 2 years" or "I have lived in Spain for 2 years", NOT "I have been in Spain for 2 years".
  3. "The" or no "the": It is confusing to know when to use, as in Spanish, the use of "the" (el/la/los/las) is more common. For example: "Children are more innocent than adults" NOT "The children are more innocent than the adults" (Even though in Spanish we say "Los niños son más inocentes que los adultos"). This is because we are talking about the children and the adults in general, and there is no need for "the". "The" is generally used only to talk about more specific things.
  4. Prepositions: This is posibly the most disliked part of English for people who are learning. Prepositions are simply different in Spanish and English. The only way to get to grips with the prepositions is to take it easy and revise as much as possible. Even make a list of words that follow each preposition.
  5. Subject-verb agreement: This is one of the most common mistakes made in English. An example could be, "Everyone love that movie", this is incorrect. The correct way is, "Everyone loves that movie". "Everyone" is a singular noun, even though it includes many people. This is called, collective nouns. Collective nouns are a collection of things taken as a whole that takes the singular form of the verb. More examples of when we use the singular form of the verb are: anybody, somebody, anyone, everybody, someone, anything, everything, something, etc. The way to remember if a verb takes the singular or plural for is: all words that end in -one, -thing and -body are singular.

I hope this can help you improve some of your common mistakes when using English.

Temas