🇬🇧🤪 COMMON MISTAKES NATIVES MAKE 🤪🇬🇧
Hi ladies and gentlemen! I've been teaching Russian speakers for years and you are scared stiff of making mistakes. Hopefully, this post will lighten your spirits a tad knowing that even we natives have our moments 😁
✅ Common mistakes among young kids:
👦 Overusing regular verb structures for irregular ones: I eated, I goed, I singed, I buyed (the linguistic term for this is called 'overregularization errors')
👧 'You are my bestest friend!' Confusing the superlative structure for 'best.' (many adults say bestest as a way to sound sweet)
👦 Confusing No and not. But this gets sorted by the time they are 4 or 5.
✅ Adult mistakes where we should know better:
👉 SHOULD OF DONE (should have done). We often say rather quickly "should've done" where the "'ve" is confused for OF instead of HAVE (because of connected speech). This actually appeared in a The Sun news article the other day 😵
👉 I DONE for I DID. If you watch some UK soap operas or hang around the average Brit, you might be surprised how common this mistake is: I DONE my homework! (I suspect, again, it's because of connected speech where the 've gets dropped in the present perfect)
👉 Most English people do not know the 2nd and 3rd forms of the verbs: LIE and LAY as irregular verbs: LIE LAY LAIN/ LAY LAID LAID. The problem is that LIE can be a regular verb TO LIE TO SOMEONE. That is: LIE LIED LIED. We often use the regular forms instead of LAY LAIN. Sometimes instead of LAID LAID, people write LAYED. You'll see this in formal writing!!!😮
👉 HANG has two forms HANG HUNG HUNG/ HANG HANGED HANGED. The second one is when someone is executed; they hang to death. However, many native speakers say "The criminal was hung."
👉 Some natives often use double negatives when English doesn't allow it: I DON'T KNOW NOTHING! кошмар pancake!! You can't imagine how common this mistake is. Sometimes it's made on purpose for pop-cultural reasons. 🤡
👉 AMOUNT OF/NUMBER OF. Countable and uncountables, much many etc are natural to us. But for some reason we make mistakes with AMOUNT/NUMBER OF. We often use AMOUNT OF with countable nouns where is should be used with uncountable nouns. A NUMBER OF is with countable plurals.🙈
👉 APOSTROPHE. Many natives really have no clue how to use the apostrophe. You will see mistakes on public signs quite often. 90% of natives could not tell you the difference between 'The kid's toys, the kids' toys and kids toys.' The sad fact is that we practically don't touch punctuation in school.
👉 YOUR vs YOU'RE. A widespread mistake indeed. Throw into that: Their, they're, there. Quite a few adults confuse the usage. I see this on a daily basis reading Youtube comments by natives. They often possess a strong lexis but make these basic mistakes. кошмар!!!!!!!!!!!🤢
👉 Many natives don't know how to use WHOM. We can argue that is word is slowly disappearing from English because it's archaic for us. The only time natives may use this is in: To WHOM it may concern. But when writing formally, we'd write WHO instead of WHOM.
👉 IF I WAS YOU! Yes boys and girls, even your teacher, ME, makes this mistake. I regularly say: I wouldn't do that if I WAS you! It's become such a fossilized mistake that it's now a part of our everyday vernacular. Even some exam boards accept WAS as well as WERE.
👉 ORGANIZE (American spelling) For so long British spelling wasn't recognised (this is underlined in red as I write; even VK doesn't like the British version). For argument sake, we just add the Z rather then feel pathetic being shown millions of errors! It's become a habit for many.
There you go guys! Hope that makes you feel a little better! You're not alone!❤ Oh, and where this might annoy you, we don't really make mistakes with articles 👻😈😁
