Common Mistakes

Hello and welcome to the Gold Forest English podcast. My name is Jordan. Today, I want to talk about some common mistakes that students use. These mistakes are very small and simple, but they make a big difference. Native speakers really notice these small mistakes. So, if we think about these small things and if we can fix them, we will sound much more natural. Much better English.

The first big one that I want to talk about is the adjectives that use the letters ED and ING. So lots of adjectives in English, finish with the letters ING or ED. For example, exciting. The movie was exciting. And excited. I feel excited. So exciting and excited. With the letters ING and ED. Both of them are correct adjectives. But the meaning and the use is quite different. And so we need to be careful which one we use. So the most important thing we need to remember is that adjectives with ING describe things. It's describing something. The book is exciting. The movie is exciting. The story is exciting. This book is boring. The movie was boring. I'm describing a book. I'm describing a movie. describing a place, describing a party, describing anything. I'm using ING to describe the things. When we use the same adjectives with ED, excited, bored, interested, fascinated. Any adjectives with ED. These are describing our feelings, people's feelings. We're not describing the thing. I'm not giving my opinion. I'm just talking about my feeling or somebody else's feeling. I'm excited. I'm bored. He is interested. She is fascinated. They are frightened. So when we're using the adjectives with ED, It is just talking about the feelings. So lots of students make this mistake and confuse these words. Students will say things like I'm boring. When they really should say, I'm bored. If we're talking about our feelings, we need to use the ED. If you say, I'm boring. You're describing yourself as a boring person. Other people should not talk to me. I am a boring person It's not fun to spend time with me. I'm boring. This is correct English, but probably not the meaning that you want to use. Instead, correct English should be, I'm bored. So this is a very small confusion, just using the wrong word. However, makes a big difference with the meaning.

Another common mistake that students use is using adjectives with multiple nouns in the same sentence. So, let me give you an example. If I'm eating some food. And I want to describe this food. I'm enjoying the food. It's very good food. If I describe it, and I say the sentence, It is delicious taste. It is delicious taste. What I'm doing - I'm using the adjective delicious, but I'm also using multiple noun subject words. I'm using it. And taste. The adjective delicious is describing it, and it's describing taste. And in that sentence, both of those words are doing the same thing. I want to talk about the flavor of the food. Both of those words, it and taste are describing and talking about the same thing in my sentence. So when we're describing something with it is, they are, he is, she is, with adjectives. Often we can remove the other noun. He is friendly man. Man and he are doing the same thing in that sentence. So just he is friendly. That's very good, no problems. He is friendly. It is delicious. She is tall. All of these sentences are good. We don't need an extra noun word. She is tall girl. If you want to, we can make sentences like, She is a tall girl. This is acceptable English. There's no problem with it. It's perfectly acceptable. She is a tall girl. Now, a tall girl is like a noun phrase. This is a thing. And I'm saying, she is this thing. She is a tall girl. But the sentence, she is tall girl, is not correct. We've got she and girl doing the same thing, and the adjective tall is trying to describe both of them, which is not how we use adjectives. Adjectives describe one thing at a time. So, when we're using sentences with adjectives, using it is, she is, he is, remember that we don't need an extra noun word, like man, taste, girl. We can just keep it simple with one adjective.

Remember, simple English is not bad. Simple English is perfectly fine, perfectly acceptable. There's no problem with using simple English.

All right. Well, I just wanted to talk a little bit about these 2 problems, but on the website, goldforestacademy.com. I've got a full blog post with many more problems as well as examples and explanations. So if you want to think more about these issues and check out any other common problems. Please take a look at our website. All right. Thank you very much for listening. I'll see you in the next episode. Goodbye.