This video brilliantly distills complex contrastive linguistics into a practical roadmap for overcoming native language interference. It’s an essential reality check for learners who are often blind to the structural imprints of their own mother tongue.
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The English Mistake in Each Country
Added:For you, what is the hardest part about learning English? Where do you make the most mistakes? Well, in this episode we'll be talking about the most common mistakes in each country around the world. Of course, I won't be covering every country because that would be a very long episode, but based on my experience as a teacher for over 10 years, I'm going to share my experience with learners and the mistakes I hear again and again for many of the bigger countries around the world or the bigger English learning countries. And I think it's going to be very useful because you may hear your country mentioned and you might learn something about the mistakes that you might be making as well or perhaps your friends and the people around you. And I think when we come to other countries, they're not always just within that country, you know? So, you might have this mistake that is common in this country, but you may also see this to some level in your country as well. And I think there's going to be a lot to learn from all of that as well. I'll try to make it conversational and casual and fun as we go through. So, let's get into it. If you don't know, if this is your first time, I am Michael and this is my podcast, the Level Up English podcast.
So, let's get started. I'll get right into it and I'll start with a very populous country. Populous is an adjective that means it has a large population, many people who live there.
And this is the country of Brazil. So, hello to my Brazilian listeners or watchers. Hope you're doing well.
Maybe you can think about what kind of mistake you often make if you are from Brazil or maybe a Portuguese speaker in general.
And one of the most common that I hear all the time, not only from Brazil, as I said, it's common in many places, but especially Portuguese speakers. I don't know why, maybe it's something about the education system, is the pronunciation of the past tense ED.
So, this is like, for example, invite and invited. So, of course, invited is the past tense. But, a common area of confusion is people take this pattern, and they apply it to all of the past tense verbs with ED. And that's just not how it works.
So, in English, we have three pronunciations of this ED. I'll try to think of some examples now. Uh talk. All right, right now I am talking. But, in the past, a common mistake would be talked.
But, no, we don't say talked. It's one syllable, and this is talked.
talked Right? So, this is an interesting one.
It It basically is talk with a T on the end. talked So, it you go from the K to the T.
Kutta. talked Right? Sorry if that sounds very annoying in your ears, but yeah, that's how we say it, talked. So, we do not say talked.
Uh another example would be, let me think of a good one.
Or, rain. Maybe rain. Which it's not doing today. It's a lovely sunny day today. But, in the past tense, we wouldn't say rained.
We would say rained.
rained So, again, this is one syllable, and the difference here is it's a d sound. So, before we had t, and now this is d.
So, rain I guess the main thing to remember, I think the most important is if the sound of the verb ends in a t or I should say a t or a d, right? So, invite ends in a t or a d like attend, attend, then we add an extra syllable. So, invited, attended.
Okay, so that t and the d, they're very important here. Invited, attended. If it doesn't end in a t or d sound, then we do not add an extra syllable.
And there are rules for that, but I feel like it's kind of hard to pronounce it wrong in my opinion. Like talked, talked. It's quite hard to say that with a d sound. So, when you just pronounce the e d, it's easier to say the t.
Talked, talked. It just comes out quite naturally, I feel. And for other words, let's do another one such as move.
It's a bit harder to say t. Moved, moved. Moved, moved. No, that's quite difficult to say. So, I think for the other words, just say whatever sounds natural and it's probably going to be correct.
That's my usual advice. We don't have to make it too complicated.
But yeah, that's a tricky one though.
So, just be aware of that, and if you're not sure, look it up online or Google it and ask for the pronunciation and learn gradually. But yeah, that's important to be aware of.
So, my question for you with this one is what English pronunciation mistake took the longest for you to fix?
Mhm.
Obviously, I cannot answer Well, actually no, that's not true. I can answer this question. I was going to say because I'm a native speaker, it doesn't apply to me, but of course, that's not true. I make pronunciation mistakes all the time. And I guess this is a question, you know, what what defines a mistake? If a native speaker makes that mistake, is it wrong?
Or I don't know, it's hard to say, I guess. It's how you define it. But if you look at language, we can say prescriptively, which is very hard word, but that just means this is what language is and there's no room for creativity. This is how it is. If you don't use it this way, you're wrong.
So, that's this prescriptive idea. If you look at it that way, then I do make mistakes. One that I have spoken about many times is the th sound, which I'm always really bad at, even from way back when I was a little boy, and stuff like uh three, three, you know, two, three, four.
That's very hard for me. And even harder is when it comes at the end of the word, like a day, a week, and a month.
month And what usually comes out is an f, month, month. Which is quite lazy, but myself and many other native speakers do this, even though it's not really recommended, especially if you're learning.
But this is something I'm always working on. Whenever I say these words, I try my best to do better and better every time, but yeah, I'm with you. I'm I'm I'm right there with you. If you find pronunciation hard, you are not alone.
Okay, I'm going to try to do one for each country today, so as not to take too long. But we're going to a a similar language now. We're going to Spanish.
So, any Spanish speakers out there, the most common one I see is mistake that is is double negatives.
And you might say this is not a big deal, but I see this all the time with Spanish speakers and I believe this is because this is how you say it in Spanish. I don't really know Spanish, but that's what I assume. And this is for example, I didn't do nothing.
There's that th again, by the way.
I didn't do nothing. So, I should say as I mentioned a few weeks ago in a previous episode, this is fairly common with native speakers, but it sounds quite slang, quite casual, and it's certainly not a formal way of talking. So, generally for learners, I recommend using the correct grammar, which is I didn't do anything.
Right? And if you want a reason, I can explain quickly.
Did not and nothing are both negatives.
So, if you're doing nothing, that's just, you know, staring at the wall, you know.
Having nothing to do, right? I You know what that is, right? But if you do not do nothing, not makes it the opposite, right? So, the opposite of nothing must be something.
Right? So, did you do nothing? No, I did not do nothing. I was playing football.
Right? You you could interpret it that way. I think we usually know that that's not what you mean, but just to avoid confusion, we have this grammar rule in place. So, try to avoid that double negative. I did not do anything. That's probably the most common one I hear for Spanish speakers. Okay, well, the question we can talk about here is can you remember the last time you did nothing?
This sounds like a simple question, but I wonder if it's harder than you realize. So, when I say nothing, I mean just no phone, no computer, no talking to friends, no doing chores, no working.
You you were not trying to achieve any goal. You were maybe just sitting or standing and just doing nothing.
Right?
I suppose common examples in modern day life might be sitting on the beach, sunbathing, uh lying down in the park, something like that. Of course, it depends what we mean by nothing, right? But I feel like for me it's just very very little with no external distractions, no you know, you're you're not connected to anything else and your mind is open and not busy, maybe.
For me it was quite recently and I spoke about this before, a couple weeks ago, and this was on my recent cycle trip around South Korea. And it was on my breaks when I stopped cycling and I just sat on a bench. In fact, I I I lied down on the bench and I looked up at the clouds and honestly there wasn't a single thought in my brain. That's what it felt like. I was so peaceful, so empty. I I think I was just very happy to be relaxing.
So that was the last time that I would say I did nothing and I it was so nice.
I feel like this is a reminder to do more nothing in your life.
Uh have some time where you don't do anything and you put your phone away and who knows that might you you know, you might see some improvement in your life after trying that.
But okay. Uh by the way, I should say actually I I've I've planned quite a long list of mistakes here on my notes.
But as I said, I'm only going to talk about one mistake for each country or each language. So for that reason, I think I'm going to include the full list of mistakes up on the website.
Perhaps there will be some for members and some for non-members. So, have a look on the website and you can see my whole list of mistakes and maybe if your country is there, you can have a look at in more detail about that as well.
Yeah, for now I'm going to mention one for each. My next language is going to be Japanese.
And now there's quite a few I could say here, but I think I'm going to try to stick to the most common ones and I think a lot of the mistakes with Japanese is pronunciation.
That's the ones that are you know, commonly heard as patterns and one that many of us will be familiar with is the difference between l and r.
In fact, many countries, many languages have difficulty with the English r. It might be for example much weaker than your language. Uh, you know, it's same in Russian for example where instead of saying what's a good word? Race, I guess like race, I'm having a race, but in a Russian accent it might be more like race, race.
I can't do Russian accent, but it might be a bit stronger because that's the r that they use in Russian language.
And Japanese is a little bit different, but basically in Japanese there's no distinction between the r and the l. Or to be more specific, the equivalent sound in Japanese is a little bit like a combination of l and r and also a little bit d. You know, when you're learning Japanese, they say combine these three together, l, r, d and you get the Japanese r. r Something like that. Again, it that for me that's also a very hard sound.
It's the hardest sound for me in Japanese.
But it works in reverse as well. Japanese often have difficulty here. And even when they're writing in English, they will often mix up these letters. And this can be quite confusing. You know, you might want to write uh belly belly with double L, and instead you write berry.
berry And this is just because to many Japanese this sounds the same. So, when they write it, they don't know which letter to use.
I will say if any one is wondering, to an English speaker, they sound very different. It's just what you're used to. You have to train your ears to hear it. So, the difference between rye and lie is quite obvious for a native speaker, anyway.
And I'm I'm not going to get too much into it in this podcast, but this is really a a tongue positioning problem.
Luh.
Luh. The your tongue kind of comes through the teeth a little bit. So, lie.
You should feel your tongue touching the back of your teeth there. Lie. And maybe see it poke out if you open your lips.
Well, of course you have to open your lips.
How else can you talk?
And the ruh, I think is the hardest one, the R sound. And one mistake that many people make is the tongue is touching something, the the front of the tongue. And it shouldn't be. So, when you pronounce ruh in English, the tongue is a little bit kind of curled up, but it's kind of not touching the teeth or top of the mouth.
If you do touch the top of the mouth, it will sound more like ruh ruh, which is closer to the Japanese equivalent.
So, I'm not going to make this into a pronunciation lesson, but I do have a whole uh lesson on this topic of pronunciation on Level Up English members. That might be useful for some of you. I've got a whole pronunciation course, actually, so you can train your pronunciation step-by-step on my course.
Yeah, that's that's a hard one. So, maybe I feel like an appropriate question here would be if you can share a time in your life when you felt really really like you wanted to give up.
Really really, I mean, that's another hard word to say for many Japanese learners, really, cuz you have both sounds in there.
Yeah, really really difficult time in your life.
I haven't prepared any answers to these questions, and that's because I haven't even prepared the questions. These are coming to me on the fly, which means in real time with no previous notes on this. So, yeah, a time when I really wanted to give up. Hmm.
I think it happens occasionally in my language learning, but not seriously. I don't know what it is, but I'm very persistent. If I start something, I just don't want to give up because to me that's like admitting that I'm you know, I'm too weak. I'm not good enough, and I don't want to do that. I I I I hate that feeling. But, there have been many times where I've just had to kind of let myself feel really down, and I I I have been really really down, and I just felt like I want to like maybe my brain just isn't good enough to learn a language. You know, it's taken me so many years to get to this basic level. Am I really Is it really for me? You know, maybe not. And I've had that so many times, and maybe you have as well. Maybe you can relate to that. Yeah, it's a horrible feeling, but hopefully, just like me, if that happens to you, you can stay strong and determined, and think of these negative thoughts as you know, motivation to overcome and defeat them. I I like that idea.
And yeah, of course we learn from these low moments as well. But yeah, let me know what that would be for you, a time when you really really wanted to give up.
Okay. Well, now a lot of you will be waiting for this next language because I know this makes up a huge percentage of our listeners, and this is Arabic.
Arabic.
So, many many Arabic learners around the world or uh English learners who are, you know, native ly speak Arabic.
And there's a few here that I could talk about. I think for this one we will have to stick with another pronunciation example, and this is p and b. So, unlike the previous one, I think a lot of native speakers will agree that these sound quite similar, and also the mouth position is quite similar as well. So, it's very understandable that this would be tough for learners. And also as well, I think in Arabic you don't have these two letters. You only have one letter for them, right? So, that's probably where it comes from.
But yeah, so let let's go through how to pronounce these. It's the difference between pear, the fruit, and bear, the animal.
Right. So, basically the mouth position is kind of the same.
The main difference is that the p is voiceless and the b is voiced.
Basically, what this means is if you put your hand on your neck here, you feel vibration. So, voiceless, no vibration.
Right? You You shouldn't feel much vibration in your neck unless you go too much into p uh p. You know, the the the p won't vibrate, but the uh afterwards will vibrate.
>> [laughter] >> For the b, you should feel a lot more vibration.
It's voiced, so there's Make sure you're vibrating here. B b. Okay?
Also, a difference is aspiration, which is a very smart way of saying the air that comes out of your mouth. If you put your hand in front of your mouth and say the first one, p you should feel lots of air on your hand.
b You shouldn't really feel much. It should be very light. So, p is usually stronger.
Like, pen and ben.
So, I tried to say that at the same volume, but I felt much less air on that b there.
So, p and b.
I I I also realized that the p sound is the most annoying sound to hear in a microphone. So, I'm really sorry. I'm going to try my best not to uh use it too much more from now on.
>> [laughter] >> So, sorry if that's annoying to some of you.
So, that's a a summary. Again, I do have a longer lesson about this uh on Level Up English members.
But, I think for now let's do a question on this one. When I see p and b, I think of peanut butter. Cuz, you know, a PB&J is a a short way of saying peanut butter and jam, which is a common sandwich, especially in the USA.
And it made me think that for me, peanut butter is one of my go-to snacks. I always have peanut butter in the cupboard. Uh there's so many p's and b's in my sentences now. cupboard cupboard and it it's just I mean, it's high calories.
It tastes really good. It's pretty healthy. There's If you get a good one that's just peanut butter, nothing else in it, you know, no sugar or anything.
And yeah, just some bread and peanut butter or something like that is amazing. Or sometimes I'll make a smoothie and I will add, you know, peanut butter and bananas and blend it together. And yet, it's very versatile, which means you can use it in many different ways. So, I would like to ask you, what is your go-to snack? Go-to means something that you go to you go to get quickly when you need it. A go-to snack, a snack that you often have, basically.
Yeah, for me it might be peanut butter, something I always have in the cupboards. But let me know what the answer is for you. And bonus points if your snack includes a P or a B.
Okay, next language now. I don't know how many of you speak this language because I feel like unfortunately my podcast is blocked in this country. But maybe there are many of you listening from around the world. And this is Chinese, the Chinese language, one that I'm also learning. And it's similar to Japanese, it's so different from English. I think there are quite a few things we could talk about in terms of common mistakes.
One of the most common, I would say, pertains to grammar. That means it relates to grammar. And I think that's because Chinese grammar is pretty simple compared to English. Uh I do really feel a lot of empathy for Chinese learners because if you're coming from a language with simple grammar, English grammar must be a nightmare. It must be such a headache.
But yeah, a common mistake would just be forgetting the tenses. So, rather than saying, you know, yesterday I went to the shop, you might say, yesterday I go to the shop.
And this is always under Well, it's almost always understandable. A native speaker will not correct you because they understand what you mean because you said yesterday.
Right? And yeah, I think it's the same in Chinese, right? You know, you don't need to say the tense because you already said yesterday. So, it's obvious. So, it is it is obvious in English, but it sounds unnatural. I think that's that's the key thing here. So, yeah, yesterday I go, no, it should be yesterday I went. So, always remember the correct tense.
Uh I guess I don't really have specific advice on that, but just something to be aware of. And if you do struggle with that, maybe do some practice, start making stories about the past, writing a diary, what I did yesterday, what I'm doing now, what I will do tomorrow. And the more practice you can do, the more natural it will be to start using different tenses.
Yeah, it's not really revolutionary advice. It's just more practice, basically. And the first question that comes to my mind with this one is what is something that you did, past tense, right? Did yesterday? Or where did you go yesterday? Right, where did you go?
And for me, yesterday uh I went for a little walk. I I went with a couple people, and we went for a walk.
It wasn't Chinatown, but it was it wasn't far from Chinatown in in the city here. And we went to a park with a cemetery. Very beautiful park. And we were reading some of the gravestones in the park about the people that have passed away before, and kind of trying to work out uh you know, who they were, what their lives were like. That was kind of a nice history uh lesson, I guess, there. Then we went for some uh snacks and drinks in a little cafe nearby. And then we just continued on a little walk around these backstreets. Very enjoyable, lots to see, spent lots of time petting the cats on the floor. Well, of course, they you know, we're all on the floor. That's a weird thing to say, but petting the cats who were, you know, lying around on the road. Maybe that sounds more natural.
Yeah, that was my day. It was quite a nice day, but maybe I spent too much time outside. It was a a tiring day, for sure. Yeah, let me know, where did where did you go yesterday?
Yeah, of course, you can say I went blah blah blah blah blah.
Okay, well, let's see how many more we have. I'm getting a little bit worried that we might not have time to do all of them today.
I think I might make this one a a two-part episode. So, I might record part two in the future, and that will also give you the chance to request your country as well. So, if I haven't mentioned your country today, leave a comment down below, and I will try my best to include it in the next episode.
You know, maybe Yeah, maybe rather than country, maybe language maybe is better.
Let's maybe do French. Now, I think maybe we'll do last one today. Could be French. We'll see how it goes. But, yeah, there's a lot of French speakers around the world, and one mistake that I hear all the time This is more specific, but I hear it quite a lot. And honestly, I think this might be French and Spanish, and other languages, too, but also in French. And this is when you say how old you are, I have 25 years.
Right? In English, we don't say have with age. We say I am 25, or I am 25 years old. You know, we need to say old if we also say years. But, you know, years old comes together, basically. You know, I'm 25 years old. I wish that was still true.
Um another example is how many people in your group. This is a bit more complicated in English than other languages. In French, uh or Well, I don't know about French, but I guess it's true.
When French people speak English, they might say, you know, we are five.
Or we are five people. Or something like that. But in English, we don't start with we. We don't say that. We say, there are five of us.
So the we comes at the end, which is us in the form of us. There are five of us.
There are five of us. Okay, so how many people uh coming to my restaurant? Uh there are five of us. Okay, perfect. You know, are there 10 of you? You know, it's the same structure for any situation.
So yeah, I am 25 years old. There are two of us here in the room.
Hopefully that makes sense, but that's a common mistake I hear. And again, it's just it's just remembering the structure of English. There's no special way to learn that. It's just remembering that grammar, that structure there. And now, speaking of age, let's end this part with a a deeper question. What is advice that you would give to your 25-year-old self? I know many of you are younger than 25, so in that case, you know, what advice would you give to yourself five years ago? Or anyone five years ago.
So if I met myself who was 25, or anyone who was 25. I mean, for me, 25 was kind of around the time when I started to mature a little bit. I was leaving those like childish younger years behind, and I feel like you know, they do say that around this age, 25, 26, is when your brain fully develops. And for me, that felt especially true. I feel like there was a distinction before and after that age.
After 25, I felt much more like an adult, and I stopped doing stupid things.
Uh that's not true.
Uh I stopped doing m- too many stupid things. The number of stupid things I do now is much lower than before.
So, that that's something I think I can say for sure, but who knows what I will I will uh regret in the future.
Yeah, so I think if I could go back to that Michael and give him some advice, I I think one common thing we would like to say is just reassurance and say, "You know, it's going to be fine. You know, whatever worries you have right now, you know, in 10 years or whatever how long how however old you are, you know, I'm still here. I'm still happy.
Yeah, I'm I'm I'm okay. No problems. So, anything you're worried about now is going to be fine. Just don't worry." And I feel like that would go so far because I think we know that's going to be true.
You know, when we have a problem in life, we deep down we know that it's not going to make us homeless or it's not going to you know, destroy our entire life. But, we always have these crazy ideas like if I make the wrong decision, my whole life is ruined forever.
I think that almost never happens, right? So, I think just seeing that there is a future where you're happy and healthy is well, I should say would be reassuring. That would be nice.
Yeah, I mean I'm trying to think back to that time. Was there anything I was doing wrong? Oh, okay. Here's here's a good specific one now.
Around this time is when I was getting more into exercise. I was doing a lot of yoga, um lots of walking, some cycling.
I was skateboarding as well. I was doing lots of active stuff that I really enjoyed. If I could go back, I might say that Michael, you should go to the gym. You should do more strength training.
I think the reason for that is because from what I've heard, once you get, you know, above 30, it becomes much harder to build muscle.
And also much more important, the older you are, the more important it is to build muscle. This is what I've heard.
But, also if you don't actively build that muscle, your muscle will decrease, you know, every year after 30.
So, it's really important to keep working on that. But, I feel like if you start before you're 30, you have a head start, which means you're already in a really good place. If you enter your 30s with lots of muscle, then that's going to be a really good sign for the rest of your life, because you're going to have that muscle to build off, right? That's my feeling. But, yeah, I didn't start strength training much in my 20s, and I wish I had. I really wish I had. I feel like it would have been better.
You know, not that, you know, yoga is good, of course, but if I focused a bit more on other stuff as well as yoga, I feel like that would be better for my future.
But, you know, I like to be optimistic, so as they say, the best time to plant a tree was maybe when I was 25.
But, the second best time is now. It's never too late to start, so I'm not going to feel bad about it, but that would be the advice I would give uh if I could go back. So, there's my answer. What would your answer be? What advice would you give to your 25-year-old self? Hm.
But, okay. Well, I do think I'll leave it there. So, we've covered uh Brazil, Spain, Japan, Arabic, many countries that speak Arabic, uh China, and France.
And, I've got a few more on my list. 1 2 3 4 5 6. I've got six more countries to cover for next time in part two. But, again, if you want me to cover your country as well, leave it in the comments, and I would love to try to do it and include it next time.
I think we'll just end now with a quote from Mark Twain. And this is travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
So, I'll read that one one more time.
Travel is fatal Fatal means it will kill you to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
So, prejudice is judging someone before you know them. Bigotry is, I guess, the idea of thinking you're you're better or bigger than other people and hating people because of their differences.
And narrow-mindedness, you know, not having an open mind and only having your very small opinions on the world.
And I totally agree with this. I feel like you know, in other words, what he's saying is if you travel around the world, it's much more difficult to have all of these negative beliefs about people. You you start to see that there are many ways to live a happy life and everyone's the same. You know, no one is uh less important than you. No one is uh lower than you. So, yeah, I love this idea.
So, if you do travel to all of these countries that we've mentioned today, you might have a more open-minded view of the world and less judgmental as well.
I really wish we could just make every everyone who is kind of a bigot.
Bigot is quite a strong word for someone who hates other people. But, I wish we could make these people travel the world and maybe they would have their minds opened as well.
Okay, well, let's end it here. Thank you so much for listening. Uh I really hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one. Maybe in part two, hopefully coming up soon. Goodbye.
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