Writing in a second language is no small feat. There is a particular kind of courage in putting your thoughts down in a language that did not grow up with you — one that does not sit in your bones the way your mother tongue does. The good news is that most errors made by non-native English speakers tend to follow recognisable patterns. That means once you understand what they are, you can address them in a focused and practical way. Here are some of the most common ones and how to correct them.
The Trouble with Articles: A, An, and The
If your first language is Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, or any of the many languages that do not use articles, then this section is probably very familiar territory. Articles are tiny words, but they carry a lot of weight in English, and getting them wrong can make writing feel slightly off to native readers, even when everything else is technically correct. This is why people who start learning English like to buy speech first to get it right and make sure every tiny detail stays in place.
The core rules are this: use a or an when something is being introduced for the first time or is non-specific, and use the when referring to something that both the writer and the reader already know about. So you might write, “I found a café near the school,” where “a café” is unknown to the reader, but “the school” is already established.
A useful strategy is to read English content regularly and pay attention to how articles appear in context. Reading news articles or books trains your eye in ways that grammar rules alone cannot.
Tense Confusion: Mixing Past, Present, and Future
Another extremely common error is switching verb tenses mid-paragraph or mid-sentence without a grammatical reason to do so. This happens in part because some languages express time differently, through context, adverbs, or aspect rather than through changes in the verb form itself.
Common tense slip-ups to watch for
Dropping the past tense marker is probably the single most frequent verb error — “Yesterday I walk to the shop” turning up where “Yesterday I walked to the shop” belongs. It happens fast, especially when you’re focused on what you’re saying rather than how you’re saying it.
The other one that catches a lot of people out is mixing up the present perfect and the simple past. If your first language treats these as interchangeable, or doesn’t really distinguish between them at all, then a sentence like “I have seen her yesterday” can feel perfectly natural to write — but in English it isn’t. “Yesterday” refers to a specific moment in the past, and once you have that specific time reference, the past simple takes over: “I saw her yesterday.” The present perfect is for things without a clear timestamp — “I’ve seen that film” — where the when doesn’t really matter.
Prepositions: The Part That Nobody Warned You About
Ask any English learner what their least favourite aspect of the language is, and a significant number will point to prepositions. As non-native journalists say, prepositions are often the last thing to fall into place — even for writers publishing regularly in English. The problem is that English prepositions are frequently idiomatic. There is no universal logic to explain why you “arrive at” a building but “arrive in” a city, or why you are “interested in” something but “good at” something else. These simply have to be learned phrase by phrase.
Building better preposition habits
The most effective method is not memorising a list of rules, but rather noting and recording the prepositions that come alongside specific verbs and adjectives in the texts you read. Keep a small notebook, or a note on your phone, and when you encounter a phrase like “responsible for” or “addicted to,” write it down. This method of collecting chunks of language in context is far more reliable than trying to apply abstract rules.
False Friends and Direct Translation
Romance language speakers tend to get ambushed by this one most often, but it really does trip up learners from every background at some point. False friends are words that look or sound close enough to something in your own language that your brain just… accepts them. And then they mean something completely different in English.
Spanish actualmente looks and sounds close enough to “actually” that the wrong word comes out, when “currently” was what was needed. The same goes for the French éventuellement, nudging a writer toward “eventually” instead of “possibly.” These examples follow a completely understandable logic. The problem is that the logic belongs to a different language, and English didn’t get the memo.
Direct translation is a separate issue, though it tends to cause similar confusion. Every language has worked out its own way of expressing things — particular rhythms, particular structures, particular ways of grouping ideas together. None of that transfers cleanly. A sentence that sounds natural and even elegant in Mandarin, Polish, or Arabic can come across as awkward or just plain unclear once it’s been moved word by word. The thought is still there; it’s the English that isn’t quite holding it together.
To solve the issue, one should read more in English and develop a feel for how ideas are expressed naturally rather than how they might be translated. Exposure over time is the single most effective tool here. As linguists have documented, false friends arise because languages evolve differently, even from shared roots — and English is a particular outlier, having shifted further from its European cousins than almost any other language. That’s what makes them so stubborn: your brain isn’t making a random error. It’s following perfectly reasonable logic from the wrong rulebook.
Subject-Verb Agreement: The Small Errors That Stick Out
“She walk to work every day.” “The children was playing in the garden.” These kinds of errors have a way of jumping out at a native reader, even when everything else in a piece of writing is solid. And they’re not just a beginner problem either — plenty of people who’ve been writing in English for years still make them when they’re tired or rushing to get their thoughts down.
The rule itself is simple enough: one person or thing doing something, the verb gets an -s in the present simple. He walks, she runs, it works. More than one, and the -s disappears. The past simple gives you a bit of a break here, because the verb doesn’t shift at all — “she walked” and “they walked” look exactly the same, which is one less thing to worry about.
Irregular verbs are where the wheels come off. There’s no pattern to lean on, no rule that gets you there — you just have to know them. “The children was playing” is instantly obvious to someone who grew up speaking English, but if plurality works differently in your first language, or gets expressed through a different part of the sentence entirely, that mistake can feel completely invisible while you’re writing it.
Why it happens more in writing than in speech
Interestingly, many learners who produce correct subject-verb agreement in speech make errors in writing. This is partly because writing is slower, and the brain may move ahead to the content of a sentence before the grammatical framework is fully laid out. Proofreading specifically for verb forms catches most of these before a reader does.
How to Build Better Habits Going Forward
English is a wonderfully accommodating language in many ways; it has absorbed words from hundreds of others, and it tolerates variation far more than it sometimes gets credit for. Making mistakes is a sign of trying, and that always deserves more credit than it gets.
Understanding common errors is only part of the solution; the other part is consistent, deliberate practice. Read more to build an internal sense of how English works. Write regularly to build confidence. Don’t shy away and ask for feedback from native speakers to catch the errors that feel invisible.
Disclosure: This is a featured post.
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