The biggest mistake I notice with non-native speakers is verb conjugation, especially with future tense. This may be because I hang around a lot of Vietnamese ESL people, idk. For example, “I go” instead of “I am going” is a common mistake I see.
For natives, the biggest mistake is misspellings and a lack of punctuation. Occasionally you’ll also see excessive punctuation and run-on sentences.
This is because most East Asian languages actually don’t conjugate their verbs at all!
In Chinese, for example, you always use the same exact verb, you just add extra sounds called “particles” to the sentence to contextualize what you’re saying.
e.g. “I’m going to the store” in Chinese is 我(wǒ - ‘I’)去(qù - ‘go’)商店(shāng diàn - ‘store’). I go store.
To say “I went to the store”, you don’t change “去/qù”. Instead you still just say “I go store”, but you add “了/le” to the end of the sentence. “Le” is a particle that means “to finish; to be completed”.
So to say “I went to the store”, you literally say “I go store (past particle)”, and the listener knows that the statment “I go store” already happened and ended - past tense.
This is why native English speakers often think of this type of grammatical mistake when they think of common English mistakes that East Asian language native speakers make.
yeah, in some languages it’s even more complicated, you have the thing called inflection, we have this here in Polish but some languages went overboard with this like Spanish for example, currently I’m learning Japanese via duolingo and i find it relatively simple
The biggest mistake I notice with non-native speakers is verb conjugation, especially with future tense. This may be because I hang around a lot of Vietnamese ESL people, idk. For example, “I go” instead of “I am going” is a common mistake I see.
For natives, the biggest mistake is misspellings and a lack of punctuation. Occasionally you’ll also see excessive punctuation and run-on sentences.
This is because most East Asian languages actually don’t conjugate their verbs at all!
In Chinese, for example, you always use the same exact verb, you just add extra sounds called “particles” to the sentence to contextualize what you’re saying.
e.g. “I’m going to the store” in Chinese is 我(wǒ - ‘I’)去(qù - ‘go’)商店(shāng diàn - ‘store’). I go store.
To say “I went to the store”, you don’t change “去/qù”. Instead you still just say “I go store”, but you add “了/le” to the end of the sentence. “Le” is a particle that means “to finish; to be completed”.
So to say “I went to the store”, you literally say “I go store (past particle)”, and the listener knows that the statment “I go store” already happened and ended - past tense.
This is why native English speakers often think of this type of grammatical mistake when they think of common English mistakes that East Asian language native speakers make.
yeah, in some languages it’s even more complicated, you have the thing called inflection, we have this here in Polish but some languages went overboard with this like Spanish for example, currently I’m learning Japanese via duolingo and i find it relatively simple
My wife used to work with a ESL Asian person. When he got upset at work he always said “I go to mad.”