English for natives

[Irina]

Hi!

I'm a non-native English teacher and what I do every day is explain English grammar & vocabulary and correct my students' mistakes. As I've been doing it for several years, I know typical mistakes that people of my language can make. But unfortunately, I know nothing about typical mistakes that natives can make when they 1) learn English at school, 2) speak the language just in life. So what are they, their typical mistakes? Are they tenses, articles, prepositions? If somebody has something to tell me, I would be really really glad! And I hope, this topic would interesting for you to discuss.

[netsem]

You are doing so really good work becuase it not easy to change typical mistakes of people. It is also tough to tenses, articles, prepositions correction. So i think that you are doing superb work.

[Joe]

One typical mistake native speakers often make - especially when they are distracted or in a hurry etc - is to mix up the spellings of:

their
there
they're

because they all sound the same.

A similar error is to write "it's" instead of "its".

[Dixie]

And also "your" instead of "you're".

One typical mistake native speakers often make - especially when they are distracted or in a hurry etc - is to mix up the spellings of:

their
there
they're

because they all sound the same.

However, my students just can't seem to understand they all sound the same and tend to pronounce them differently.