Common mistakes foreign people make when attempting to learn English.

We all know, English is one of the hardest languages to learn. I explored the difficulties foreign people have when learning English. I've chosen four languages I think have the most  interesting differences to English.

Japanese.  Despite what some believe, Japanese is NOT related to Chinese. Japanese and English differ in the way that no element of the Japanese sentence regularly shows plurality and since the distinction between countable and uncountable is not recognised, number and countability prove difficult.  Many Japanese achieve good standards in written English except for articles and the number-countability problem.

·         For example: In Japan, industrial product is cheap. Because we have an economic growth. But vegetable is so expensive. Because we Japanese have a few lands.

 English consonant clusters prove difficult for Japanese speakers because they often tend to break them up by adding in short vowels.

 

Spanish as we all know, is renowned for romance! Spanish vocabulary refers to both the members of a male and female pair by using the plural of the male form. "Padres" which in English literally means fathers, can be used in Spanish to say parents. Spanish vocabulary has something called 'false friends' which are pairs of words that look similar in two languages (English and Spanish) however don't mean the same. This can prove difficult when speakers attempt English.

·         E.g. Discutir in Spanish is to argue.

As a native the word Discuss could lead you to think it would mean to argue due to it looking so similar.

·         Another example is the word Caravana which means traffic jam (Spanish),  as a speaker the word caravan (English) could easily lead you to think it meant traffic jam. False Friend!

 

Farsi is an Indo-European language which has been influenced by Arabic. The Farsi and English phonological systems differ in their range of sounds and in their stress. Farsi, in contrast to English has only eleven vowels and diphthongs to thirty two consonants. Farsi speakers therefore have trouble recognising and articulating the full range of English vowels and diphthongs. There are five consonant phonemes in English that don't have close equivalents in Farsi. The equivalent of the auxiliary 'to be' is sometimes added to nouns as a suffix instead of being used in its full form.

Farsi speakers often leave it out when attempting English for example:

·         She (a) teacher, instead of she is a teacher.

 

Finally the Malay/ Indonesian (M/I) language which belongs to the western Austronesian group of languages. M/I native speakers often have trouble with IT and THERE because the equivalent structure in M/I language uses the word ada meaning (got/has/is)

Errors like these are common:

·         Was an examination last week.

·          Is nice to play football.  

Active and Passive can prove difficult for M/I speakers because although old M/I literary writing uses passive forms more frequently than the modern language does, when speaking the passive form is usually avoided. Passives are also formed very differently in M/I. Speakers find English passives difficult for example:

·         The door is open by me.

Olivia Duff

References:

Swain and Smith Learner English 2001