Native speakers also make mistakes!

For most learners, a native speaker is a God who lives in some flawless grammar paradise no foreigner will ever see. For better or for worse, the image of the perfect English of native speakers is far from being true. We all make mistakes and we all have to learn grammar to fix them! The only difference lies in the kind of mistakes we and the natives tend to make.

Interestingly, non-native learners know much more about English than native speakers. While we are all familiar with terms like gerund, participle, modals, pronouns, most native speakers have probably never come across them nor are they able to talk theoretically about their own language and explain why they speak the way they do. While in some countries basics of linguistics are taught at schools, English as a school subject in the United States or Great Britain mainly means talking about literature or practising spelling and not general explanations of grammar or latin grammatical terms.

So what kinds of mistakes do native speakers make?

Since they learn to speak English much sooner than they learn to write it, they make a lot of spelling mistakes. Most of them are related to homophones, which means that they confuse two words that are pronounced in the same way, but spelt differently. “No smoking aloud” instead of “No smoking allowed” or “I would of done it” instead of “I would have done it” are mistakes foreigners would never make since these two words exist as two separate entities in their minds. Similarly, natives often tend to confuse “it’s”, “they’re” and “you’re” for “its”, “their” and “your”. Sometimes they write “hear” instead of “here” and so on.

Since they know English so well and it is easy for them to guess which auxiliary verb is missing, they also tend to omit these tiny details. Consequently, sentences like “I done it” “Where the kids?” or “Has he wrote it?” that can be tolerated in nonstandard spoken communication tend to appear in formal texts written by native speakers, which once again is something non-native speakers would hardly ever do.

Though they are said to be able to distinguish between subtle differences in meaning of nouns or verbs, they often cannot use pronouns, quantifiers and other parts of speech that foreigners are familiar with. Mixing up “whether” with “if”, “that” with “which”, “less” with “fewer” are once again mistakes non-native speakers are often able to correct.

Does this mean that native and non-native speakers do not have anything in common when it comes to struggling with English grammar?

No, of course they have similar issues too. For example, both groups struggle with commas (“Slow children crossing” is fun, but will not save many lives☺) and double negatives (“I don’t have no money” — sounds logical, doesn ́t it?). All of us tend to misspell certain words (quite x quiet, than x then, piece x peace) and we are all selfish enough to start a phrase with I or Me (“Me and Mike met at Starbucks this morning”- what’s wrong with that?)

So why is it good to be aware of all this?

Of course it feels nice to realise that the native-speaking God is actually not perfect, but how can it help non-native speakers to improve? Well, we need to realise that while just chatting with a native will boost ourself-confidence, it is only knowing the theory and understanding the mistakes we tend to make that can prevent us from repeating them and help us to keep improving our English. You have perhaps already guessed that most native speakers cannot be of much help here, so it is high time you started learning seriously with someone who can answer your questions and explain your mistakes. If you lack time or money to get a private teacher, consider using Engramo which combines examples, explanations and exercises to help students learn English as fast as possible.