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Teachers > English Reference : Grammar

Common Mistakes

This portion of grammar is dedicated to mistakes that are commonly made specifically by Taiwanese's students studying English. These are mistakes that I have seen made over and over again in my 5 years experience of teaching English in Taiwan.

"there have" - You can't say "there have" in English. This mistake is often confused with "there are" and "there is". "There is" and "there are" already have the meaning of "have" embedded in them.

"I have ever" -  "Ever" can only been used when asking a question, so one can say " Have you ever been to Taiwan?".

"must to" -  This is incorrect, you can say "I must (verb)." or " I have to (verb)."  I think many students confuse "must to" with "have to".

Fun / funny - These are two different words however Taiwanese students often tend to mix them up. 

"I like to swimming" - When we use "like to" it must be followed by the root form of the verb, " I like to (verb)".  So we must say "I like to swim." , however if we use the Gerund form of  "swim", which is "swimming" we can say "I like swimming".

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Irregular Past Tense Verbs

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Plural Nouns

Plural Noun Spelling

In English is we are talking about more than one noun we must refer to it in it's plural form. This is simply done by adding "s" onto the end of any countable noun. This is the case most of the time with the exception of the situations listed below:

We make a noun plural by adding "es" when the singular noun ends in the following letters:   
-s/-ss/-sh/-ch/-x/-o

examples:

church/churches
bus/buses
wish/wishes
box/boxes
kiss/kisses
potato/potatoes

When a noun ends in a consonant + "y" (-by/-ly/-sy, etc.) we make the noun plural by deleting the "y" and adding "ies"

examples:

baby/babies
family/families
secretary/secretaries
story/stories

Plural Noun Spelling 

Some nouns have a completely different word when we make them plural, these nouns are called irregular plural nouns. Refer to the chart below for a complete list of these nouns.

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Sentence Structure

There are basically two things that you have to understand in order to write and speak good English.

1. English is a “word-order-language”

What this means is that word order is necessary to the meaning of everything we say and write. When we speak English we discover that the word order is very inflexible and must be followed at most times. There are of course some exceptions to this, however the basic word order in English is as follows: Subject-Verb-Object-Manner-Place-Time (S/V/O/M/P/T)

Try to train yourself to use this pattern when speaking or writing. You must also be careful not to change the nouns around because it can really change the meaning of what you are saying.

For example: The customer paid the cashier. (The customer being the Subject and the cashier the Object) or The Cashier paid the customer. This sentence has a totally different meaning.

2. Sentence Structure

Sentence structure is the way we show a relationship between ideas and events. There are basically three different kinds of sentence structure that you must learn.

A) The simple sentence – this type of sentence simply contains a subject and a verb.
E.g. “ All the shoes were sold.”

B) The compound sentence – this type of sentence has two or more simple sentences that are connected by a conjunction such as: but, and, or, etc.
E.g. “ I asked her the question but she didn’t answer me.

C)    The complex sentence – this type of sentence has two or more simple sentences that are connected by a conjunction such as: when, since, as soon as, etc.
E.g. “ We knew we lost the game as soon as they made a goal 

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Grammar Quizzes

Requests: Will, Would, Could, Can, Would you mind...?

* Will, would, could and can are modals. Modals don't have -s in the third person singular.

Notes to keep in mind:

Exercise 1. Check the appropriate answer.

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