Common Mistakes - Blog Posts

Some common English mistakes in Japan

After teaching English here in Japan for nearly 20 years, I've noticed that there are some common mistakes that keep coming up. Fighting off the urge to roll your eyes, a teacher needs to understand this is a teachable moment. This is like finding a nugget of gold while swimming in the river. Because they are common errors, we can make a dent in this fault in the local language skills by explaining why they are wrong.

Here are a few that have come across my path in the last week or so;

"I choiced to go to school in Kansai." -> It is common to hear students mistakenly use 'choice' as a verb. I will challenge them; choice is a noun, what is the verb? If they can't come up with it, I'll introduce choose-chose-chosen. (Success/succeed has the same problem)

Safety Driver. In a similar vein, for years the Japanese police and other safety-concerned agencies have made stickers to put on cars saying 'safety driver'. Safety is a noun- safe is the correct adjective.

Do you drive MY CAR? Rather than saying 'your own' they often will staple 'my' in front of words like 'home' or 'car' for instance. I think a few clever advertising campaigns are to blame for this problem, but, hey, let's remember that 'my' means that is the speaker's own possession.

I overworked yesterday. While many may argue that it is overworking, the truth is, what the speaker wants to say is, "I worked overtime yesterday."

These are just a few examples, but there are a lot more. I will keep note as I encounter them and post again on this topic in the future.