Common Mistakes in English Language (Part 1)
Hello and welcome to Vocabulary and Grammar section of Buzznaija.com, the number one hub in Nigeria.
Today I will show you the type of mistakes that advanced learners of English make when they write exam papers.
The mistakes below have been grouped into different types, for example a learner may have spelled a word wrongly, or they may have used a regular tense for an irregular verb. Many of these mistakes are well-known to teachers.
The Top 10 Spelling Mistakes
The list below shows you the ten words that advanced students most often spell wrongly. The bold letters in these words show you which parts of the words learners most often get wrong.
To help you spell these words correctly, pay special attention to these letters in the correct spellings:
Correct Spelling | Wrong Spelling | |
1 | Accommodation | accomodation |
2 | Which | Wich |
3 | government | goverment |
4 | beginning | begining |
5 | definitely | defintely |
6 | successful | succesful |
7 | environment | enviroment |
8 | advertisement | advertisment |
9 | believe | beleve |
10 | colleague | collegue |
Spelling words in English can be difficult for learners because sometimes a word is very similar to a word in their own language but is not spelled the same. This is why French learners of English, for example, spell success with only one ‘s’, or colleague without an ‘a’.
Another thing that makes spelling difficult is that some words in English do not sound exactly as they are spelled. In the word definitely, for example, the second ‘i’ sounds more like an ‘a’. It is important that students of English learn these differences.
The Top 10 Uncountable Noun Mistakes
An uncountable noun is a noun such as furniture, music, health or happiness that has no plural form and is not a singular noun. Because uncountable nouns have no singular or plural form, they cannot be used with a, an, many, few, several etc.
Here are some examples of typical mistakes that students make with uncountable nouns, followed by the correct way to say each sentence:
✗✗ He gave me an advice.
✓✓ He gave me some advice.
✓✓ *He gave me a piece of advice.
✗✗ He gave me a lot of advices.
✗✗ He gave me many advices.
✓✓ He gave me a lot of advice.
*Note that you can make some of these nouns countable by adding a phrase such as ‘piece of’ or ‘item of’ before the noun, e.g. She gave me two very useful pieces of advice.
The words numbered 1–10 below, are the ten uncountable nouns that students most often use wrongly as if they were countable.
Uncountable noun
1. information pieces of information
2. advice pieces of advice
3. transport methods of transport
4. equipment pieces of equipment
5. behaviour* types of behaviour
6. research* pieces of research
7. training
8. knowledge
9. software pieces of software
10. accommodation
*These words also have meanings that can be made plural. See the main dictionary for these.
Although a lot of languages have words that do not have a plural form, these are not always the same words in different languages. The words for furniture in German, Russian and Italian, for example, all have a plural form.
Therefore it is easy for learners of English to make mistakes with uncountable nouns.
Meet you next week for another episode of Common Mistakes in English.
Till Then I am Adeyemo John (John Hutl), improve your Vocabulary and Grammar.
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