Teach English to students from across Europe and beyond for long enough and you develop a strange superpower: you can often guess someone’s first language from their mistakes alone. The Italian reaching for “actually” when they mean “currently”. The German capitalising every Noun with Conviction. The Spanish speaker who “has 25 years”.
None of these mistakes is embarrassing — each one is perfectly logical, imported honestly from a language where it is correct. But the most common ones are also the most fixable, because they follow patterns. Here are the mistakes we correct most often in class, and the quick fixes that actually cure them.
The Third-Person -s: Small Letter, Loud Absence
The mistake: She work in Valletta. He like diving.
One letter, endlessly forgotten — and instantly noticed by every listener. The present simple adds -s for he, she and it: she works, he likes, it costs. That is the entire rule; the difficulty is purely habit.
The fix: stop practising the rule and start practising one person. Choose someone you talk about often — your boss, your sister — and narrate their day in five sentences each morning: She wakes up early, drives to work, drinks too much coffee… A week of this installs the -s where grammar drills never reach.
Since vs For: The Duration Twins
The mistake: I have lived here since three months.
Both words serve the perfect tenses, but they answer different questions. For + a length of time: for three months, for two years, for ages. Since + a starting point: since July, since 2023, since I arrived.
The fix: the phone-number test. If what follows could be circled on a calendar (a date, a moment), use since. If it is an amount of time you could measure with a stopwatch, use for. Since Monday. For five days. Same stay, two lenses.
False Friends: The Words That Betray You
Every European language has planted traps in English. The classics we hear weekly:
actual/actually ≠ current/currently. English actually means “in fact”: Actually, I’m from Turin. If you mean now, say currently.
eventually ≠ possibly (Italian eventualmente, German eventuell). English eventually means “in the end, after a long time”: Eventually, the bus arrived.
sensible ≠ sensitive. A sensible person makes reasonable decisions; a sensitive person feels things deeply. Both are compliments; they are different compliments.
assist ≠ attend. You attend a meeting; you assist (help) a colleague.
library ≠ bookshop. The library lends; the bookshop (librería’s false twin) sells.
The fix: false friends cannot be reasoned away — they must be caught individually. Keep a private “traitor list” of the three or four that betray you, and write one true sentence with each correct meaning. Personal traitors, personally arrested.
Fun vs Funny: The Party Test
The mistake: The boat party was funny.
Unless something went comically wrong, the party was fun (enjoyable). Funny means it made you laugh — a comedian is funny; a beach day is fun. Confusing them produces sentences that mildly worry your listener: My holiday was funny invites the question “…what happened?”
The fix: remember the comedian. If no one was joking, the word is fun. This one repays the ten seconds it takes to learn, because you will use both words constantly.
Saying Your Age, Making Mistakes, and Other Verb Swaps
A cluster of small but high-frequency swaps, mostly imported from Romance languages:
You are 25 — never have 25 years. I’m twenty-five.
You make a mistake — never do a mistake. (But you do homework and do your best. Make/do pairs resist logic; learn them as chunks.)
You are right — not you have reason. You’re right, the ferry is faster.
It depends on the weather — the preposition is on, not of.
I’m looking forward to seeing you — after “to”, the -ing form, as every email sign-off eventually teaches.
The fix: chunks, not rules. Write the five correct phrases above on one card, exactly as printed, and read them aloud for a week. These are furniture phrases — once installed, they never move again.
The Real Cure Is Volume, Correction and Nerve
Notice what all these fixes share: none involves studying more grammar theory. They involve noticing, repeating and — the part self-study cannot provide — being corrected at the moment of the mistake, kindly and immediately, by someone qualified to catch it.
That is the honest argument for learning in a classroom rather than only from apps: an experienced teacher hears your personal pattern within a lesson or two and works on precisely that, while daily life in an English-speaking place supplies the volume. Students studying with us in Malta collect their corrections in the morning and road-test the fixes all afternoon — on the bus, at the café, over dinner with classmates from six countries.
Mistakes, in that environment, stop being embarrassments and become what they always really were: the raw material of progress.
Bring Us Your Traitor List
Whatever your first language taught you to say wrong, we have corrected it before — warmly, precisely and probably this week. Maltalingua is an EAQUALS-accredited English school in St Julian’s, Malta, with a maximum of 12 adults per class, so your mistakes get personal attention and your fixes actually stick.
Tell us your dates and level, and we will send a free, personalised quote. Actually, we are looking forward to it — and yes, both of those were used correctly.