The most common grammar mistakes Americans make (and don't even know).

When it comes to your mother tongue, you expect to be able to use it properly. And yet, when learning another language, you find yourself comparing English to the new language you are learning, and realize how many grammar mistakes you make. Let's see if you see yourself in one of these...

I learn as I teach, and my students learn more than just a new language. Countless times a student told me "I am realizing so much about English while learning this new language". And I must admit, as a native speaker, I also had to study a lot about my mother tongue to make sense of things that seemed inexplicable. But these grammar mistakes Americans make are becoming so much part of the spoken language, that often people do not realize that from a pure grammatical point of view, they are wrong. Let's take a look at the most common ones.

USE OF PREPOSITIONS AT THE END OF THE SENTENCE:

• "Who is he speaking to? " should be "To whom is he speaking?".

• "Who are you going with?" should be "With whom are you going?"
  

RULE: a preposition never goes at the end of a sentence.

Who vs WHOM (consequence of the above):

• "This is the lady who I met yesterday" should be "this is the lady whom I met yesterday"

• "I don't know who to go with" should be "I don't know with whom to go"

WHOM is the object of these sentences. Grammatically, WHO is only used as a subject.

ME or I?

Another subject/object dilemma.

• "My dad and me are going" should be "my dad and I are going" .

It seems like an easy one to avoid, but as an English learner I heard so often the first sentence, that I thought it was correct. Only reviewing first grade grammar with my son I realized it was wrong...

Missing THAT as connector:

• " Smith said more research is necessary" should be "Smith said that more research is necessary"

In full honesty, I am not sure if the first sentence is actually grammatically wrong. I know that in some instances the use of THAT as a connector to an dependent clause (object clause) is optional. In academic writing though, THAT is not usually omitted, as leaving it out can be misleading. When learning a latin language (Italian, French, Spanish or Portuguese), you will learn that leaving THAT out is never an option.

Use of GOOD instead of WELL:

• "How are you?" "Good thanks and you?"

This is biggy, because no one would ever say "well, thank you, and you", right?

But GOOD is an adjective, and well is an adverb, so technically saying someone is good means " a good person". Likewise, answering "I am doing good" to the question "how are you doing?" is incorrect. In English, GOOD is used more commonly and freely in lieu of WELL. Again, in Latin Languages, you must differentiate GOOD from WELL. Not doing so will lead you to speaking "strange".

WAS instead or WERE in unreal conditional:

• "If I was rich, I would buy a mansion!" should be "If I were rich, I would buy a mansion" .

The difference here is that if a situation is UNREAL or IMAGINARY, you must you WERE instead of WAS.

Confusion in the three parts of irregular verbs (drink, drank, drunk) = participle:

• "I have drank the whole bottle!" should be "I have drunk the whole bottle!"

• "We have swam in the ocean" should be "We have swum in the ocean"

In this grammar point, there is a lot of confusion among English native speakers on the correct use of the tense Present Perfect. And this is fine, I also found myself unprepared to several questions on Italian grammar. Yet, I already heard kids saying "He had went!"or adults saying "he gone". Both are improper, as the correct form of this tense requires the form TO HAVE + PARTICIPLE (the third irregular form of the verbs)

If + would:

• "If I would want to go, I would go" should be "If I wanted to go, I would go"

Yes, it looks like conditional sentences are still a mystery to some. If this is your case, no shame, just remember that WOULD is never placed after an IF...

Invite vs Invitation

LESS vs FEWER:

• "there were less people" should be "there were fewer people"

It all comes down to the nous, are we talking of a countable or uncountable thing? People can be counted, so we should use FEWER.

CONCLUSION:

If you are still reading, it means you found this article interesting. I do hope so! It has been an interesting journey for me to find out all this and more in my years of experience in teaching. I learned again after learning the first time, and maybe now you also learned something new about your own language.

Two considerations need to be done. First, everyone makes similar, though of course different grammar points, in their own language. Second, this is also the result of the natural evolution of languages. It might very well be that in one hundred years from now grammar will have changed for good, and was used to be a mistake will be common use.

We should embrace the informal spoken language and cherish the formal written literature. In every situation there is something to learn!