Some mistakes make you sound like a learner. Others actually change your meaning. This list separates the two, because they deserve very different amounts of your attention.
Below are the twenty errors that come up most often in real conversation. They are ordered roughly by cost: the early ones can genuinely confuse a listener, while the later ones simply mark you as a learner. If your practice time is limited, work from the top.
Mistakes that change your meaning
1. "I've been to" vs "I've gone to"
I've been to Japan. — I went and came back.
She's gone to Japan. — She is there now.
Using the wrong one tells people something false about where a person is. Worth fixing first.
2. "Since" vs "For"
Since takes a starting point; for takes a duration. "I've lived here since 2019" or "I've lived here for six years" — never "since six years".
3. Present simple vs present continuous for temporary states
"I work in Dubai" is your job. "I'm working in Dubai" suggests a temporary posting. Both are correct English; they just say different things, and learners often pick the one they did not mean. See our guide to tenses for the full pattern.
4. "Remember to do" vs "remember doing"
"Remember to lock the door" is an instruction about the future. "I remember locking the door" is a memory of the past. The same split applies to forget, stop and try: "I stopped smoking" (quit) versus "I stopped to smoke" (paused in order to smoke).
5. Missing or wrong articles
Usually harmless, but occasionally not: "I'm going to hospital" (as a patient) versus "I'm going to the hospital" (to the building, perhaps to visit). Articles deserve their own page — we wrote one on a, an and the.
6. "Actually" does not mean "currently"
In English, actually means "in fact" or corrects a wrong assumption. If you mean "at the moment", say currently or right now. This one causes genuine confusion for speakers of French, Spanish, German and Portuguese, where the similar word means "now".
7. "Sensible" vs "sensitive"
Sensible means showing good judgement. Sensitive means easily affected emotionally. Calling your manager sensitive when you meant sensible is a memorable mistake.
Mistakes that mark you as a learner
8. Third person -s
"He work here" → "He works here." Everyone understands you, but it is the single most noticeable learner error in English, and it is pure habit — no rule to understand, only repetition until your mouth does it automatically.
9. Double past tense in questions and negatives
Did you went to the meeting?
Did you go to the meeting?
Once did has carried the past, the main verb returns to its base form. The same applies to negatives: "I didn't go", not "I didn't went".
10. "I am agree"
Agree is a verb, not an adjective: "I agree", "I don't agree" or "I disagree". Never "I am agree".
11. "Explain me" / "Say me"
Some verbs need to: explain to me, say to me, describe to me, suggest to me. Others do not: tell me, give me, show me, send me. There is no logic to it — learn the two short lists.
12. "Informations", "advices", "furnitures"
Uncountable nouns have no plural. Use "some information", "a piece of advice", "two pieces of furniture". Also: news is singular — "the news is good".
13. "People is"
People is plural: "people are". Police too: "the police are investigating".
14. Adjective order
English has a fixed order — opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. "A lovely small old round brown Italian wooden coffee table." Native speakers cannot state the rule but notice instantly when it is broken. You rarely stack more than two or three, so this matters less than it looks.
15. "Very" with strong adjectives
Say "absolutely exhausted", not "very exhausted"; "really delicious", not "very delicious". Strong adjectives already contain the "very".
16. Prepositions of time: in, on, at
At for clock times (at 6pm), on for days and dates (on Monday, on 3 March), in for longer periods (in June, in 2026, in the morning). The exception worth memorising: at night.
17. "Good" vs "well"
"I speak English well" (how you do it) versus "My English is good" (what it is). "I'm good" is fine as a reply to "How are you?" — that one is settled usage, whatever older grammar books say.
18. Question word order in indirect questions
Can you tell me where is the station?
Can you tell me where the station is?
Once a question is embedded inside another sentence, it returns to normal statement order.
19. "Until" vs "by"
"I'll be here until 5" means continuously up to 5. "Send it by 5" means at any point before 5. Getting this wrong in a work email creates real misunderstandings — see our guide to professional emails.
20. Overusing the continuous with state verbs
Verbs of state — know, believe, want, need, like, own, understand — normally avoid the continuous. "I am knowing" and "I am wanting" sound wrong. (Brand slogans that break this rule are breaking it deliberately.)
How to actually fix these
Reading a list like this changes very little on its own. What works is narrowing your attention: pick one error and hunt only for it during a whole week of speaking. Ignore everything else. A single error given a week of focused attention usually disappears; twenty errors given equal attention all survive.
Speaking practice is where this gets tested, because these mistakes live in fast, unmonitored speech rather than in written exercises. Zeno's AI tutor is useful here for a specific reason: it corrects what you said and explains the fix in your own language, so you are not decoding an explanation in the language you are still learning. Try it with your one target error and see how often it appears.
Next, read tenses explained simply — several of the errors above are really one tense problem wearing different clothes.