Do you want to get excellent grades for all your English essays?
Would you like to see your teachers impressed and your classmates a bit jealous of your error-free papers?
Just check this list of top 5 typical mistakes of Arabic students and avoid them in writing. Simple as that.
5 Typical Errors of Arabic Students
What’s so special about Arabic students – you may ask. All English learners make mistakes, don’t they? And indeed they do, but the unique peculiarities of the Arabic language influence the way you think and the way you put your thoughts into words. That’s why students from the Arab world often make similar mistakes.
So, you can say “It’s not me, it’s the fundamental differences between English and Arabic” and leave it at that. Or, you can look through these 5 common mistakes and avoid them:
- Sequence of Tenses. Although even native English speakers sometimes forget to make the tenses agree in their sentences and stories, Arabic students should pay special attention to this grammar sin. If something happened in the past, make sure you use the appropriate verb forms to leave it in the past:
E.g. Wrong: He came back to the dorm room and watch TV.
Right: He came back to the dorm room and watched TV. - Missing Verb ‘Be’. It may seem that this small part of a sentence is an unnecessary trifle. Yet, English teachers don’t think so.
E.g. Wrong: You awesome.
Right: You are awesome. - Tense Substitution. Using Past instead of Present and vice versa is a simple change, but it can result in an entirely different meaning of the whole sentence.
E.g. Wrong: A meteor shower rains down on central Russia.
Right: A meteor shower rained down on central Russia. - -ING where Inappropriate. The English language has stative and relational verbs that can’t be used in Continuous tenses. For instance, the verb ‘understand’ is stative, and it can’t be used in Continuous. That’s because ‘understanding’ doesn’t usually happen in a moment. Everyone knows this, but nobody can break the rules:
E.g. Wrong: I am not understanding our teacher today.
Right: I don’t understand our teacher today. - Run-On Sentences. It is better to use shorter sentences in English. If you still want to combine 2 or more simple sentences into a long one, you’d better put a comma and a conjunction between them. Otherwise, you’ll get a run-on sentence that can sound absolutely natural to Arabic students, but would seem wrong to English teachers:
E.g. Wrong: I can’t find the mistake in this sentence I don’t know the rule.
Right: I can’t find the mistake in this sentence, because I don’t know the rule.
Are your typical mistakes missing from this list?
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