Any suggestions? Am looking to do a short series on language on my site, looking at the most common mistakes Croatians make when speaking English. Things like
How do you say that ON English?
Any others?
cheers Paul
English usage of prepositions is very difficult for many learners from every foreign language - there are hundreds, if not thousands of examples. They have to be learned.
"I can wait until he doesn't come home (dok ne in Croatian, no negative in English)."
I thnk this is a common problem to most, if not all, Slavic learners, as well as other language groups.
Correct usage of time conjunctions (or adverbs, it depends), such as as until, while, during, yet, still, when........ are miserably difficult to teach and grasp properly by the student.
If you listen carefully to many long-term ex patriates from E Europe - they may have lived in eg USA or Canada for decades, and speak English not only fluently, but eruditely - yet this error is so ingrained they don't realise it.
As a former (trained) English teacher, I can say there are other v common errors which learners from most language groups - including Slavs - struggle with.
In particular, conditionals;
In English, we say, eg;
If we go to Spain for our holidays, we'll be able to improve our Spanish.
But many language groups, in their own language, say;
If we will go to Spain for our holidays, we'll ........................
So they try to use this in English.
ditto so called second conditional - (if we went to Spain for our holidays, we would be able .........)
and third conditional -
If we had gone to Spain for our holidays, we would have been able to ...............
THEN there is the usages of present perfect tense versus the simple past
The most difficult is when a native speaker (at least from the UK) would say;
(on seeing you arriving back home, tanned and wearing a sombrero)
I suppose you've been to Spain?
or, as a pure question
Where have you been? I've been looking for you everywhere.
Because this use of English is so different from many languages, many American immigratns never learned it properly - so it is disappearing in US English.
But there is a difference between
"I've been robbed" ie this is news, please help me/do something about it
and
"I was robbed [two days ago]" ie the "news" aspect is over, and you don't need to do anything about it.
I dare say in 30 years, this difference will be lost, and everyone will be using the simple past tense. (and this subtle usage of English will be lost too. Sadly, IMO.)
There are many other difficult points - some are relatively easy to "bash out" - eg in many languages, including Slavic, they say;
I am doctor/teacher/tourist guide - because they do not have a definite or indefinite article. But this one comes up early in learning, and is a favourite for examiners, so it is usually drilled in correctly.
DD
