Common English mistakes Arabic speakers make, and how to fix them (2026)

A first language leaves fingerprints on the English built on top of it, and researchers who study Arabic-speaking learners keep finding the same ones. Three studies, each read at the source:

• Khatter (2019), in the Arab World English Journal, analysed essays by 40 Saudi women in the third year of an English degree at Majmaah University, three essays each. Punctuation was the most troublesome area, followed by spelling, prepositions, articles, verb tense and word form, and the study traced the most common errors to interlingual and intralingual transfer.
• Alshayban (2012), a Colorado State University thesis, studied essays by 100 Saudi men at Qassim University and found them leaving out the English verb "be", more often in the present and past tenses, and more often at intermediate level than at advanced. It describes leaving out "be" as one of the major and most frequent errors Arab learners make in writing English, and notes that most earlier studies put it down to transfer from Arabic.
• Abu Rass (2015), in English Language Teaching, drew on fourteen years of writing samples from 205 Palestinian Arab students training to teach English. It describes Arabic-speaking writers carrying Arabic style into English, such as long sentences joined with coordinating conjunctions, and found that supporting a point with examples and building a cohesive paragraph with the right linking words still needed practice after a first-year writing course.

From the classroom side, a British Council teacher trainer in Egypt lists the same areas: a different alphabet and different punctuation habits, the verb "be", the present perfect, word order, and a handful of sounds. None of this measures you. These are small studies of particular groups, and they tell you where to look first, not what your own English does.

Punctuation, spelling, prepositions and articles led one study's error count, and "be" is the error another study was built around.

Arabic can say "the weather hot"; English cannot. In an Arabic nominal sentence the present tense needs no verb: «الطقس حار». The British Council notes that in Arabic the verb "be" is not necessary when describing things in the present, which leads to errors like "He happy" and "He coming". English needs it every time:

• He is happy. (not "He happy")
• She is coming. (not "She coming")
• The weather is hot. (not "The weather hot")
• My brother is an engineer. (not "My brother engineer")

The fix: find the verb

Run one check on every sentence you write: find the verb. A sentence with no verb at all is usually missing "is", "am" or "are", or "was" and "were" in the past. Alshayban's 100 students left "be" out most in the present and past tenses, and the advanced group did it less than the intermediate group, which suggests the habit fades as a learner's level rises.

The same verb builds the continuous tenses

"Be" is also half of every continuous tense: "I am working", "They are studying", "She was sleeping". Without it, "I working now" has no verb English can use.

And the opposite: too much of the present continuous

The same British Council article lists overuse of the present continuous among the errors it attributes to Arabic interference. English uses the present simple for habits, routines and facts: "I work in a hospital", "She goes to school by bus", "Water freezes at 0°C". The present continuous is for what is happening now, or around now: "I am working from home this week."

Every English sentence needs a verb, and in the present that verb is often "is", "am" or "are".

Arabic marks a definite noun with «ال» and has no separate word for "a" or "an". English uses all three, and sometimes none. Article errors were among the most frequent in Khatter's study. The rules that matter most are on the British Council's page on articles:

• A job takes a or an. "She is a doctor", "He is an architect", not "She is doctor".
• A singular countable noun always needs an article or another determiner, such as my, your, this or that: "I need a car", "the car", "my car", never just "car".
• A or an depends on the sound, not the letter. "A university", because it starts with a "y" sound; "an hour", because the "h" is silent.
• The is for something the listener can identify, because it was mentioned before or there is only one: "Have you seen the car key?"

Things in general take no article

This is where «ال» misleads most. Arabic uses it for a general idea as well as a specific one. English does not: when you talk about things in general, the British Council explains, you normally use a plural or uncountable noun with no article, as in "Children need a lot of sleep" and "Water freezes at 0°C".

• «التعليم مهم» is "Education is important", not "The education is important".
• «أحبّ القهوة» is "I like coffee", not "I like the coffee", unless you mean a particular coffee.
• «الحياة صعبة» is "Life is hard", not "The life is hard".

A or an before a singular noun on first mention, the for the one you both know, and no article for things in general.

English has a tense Arabic does not map onto neatly: the present perfect, as in "I have lived" or "She has finished". The British Council article counts it among the points Arabic speakers often struggle with, as speakers of many other languages do, and gives the classic error: "I have seen him yesterday."

A finished time takes the past simple

The British Council's grammar reference is direct: the present perfect is not used with expressions of finished past time such as yesterday, last week or in 2017. Those take the past simple:

• I saw him yesterday. (not "I have seen him yesterday")
• We bought a new car last week. (not "We have bought a new car last week")

Still true now: the present perfect, with for or since

For something that started in the past and is still true, English uses the present perfect: "She has lived in Liverpool all her life", in the British Council's example. Arabic uses the present tense here, «أعيش هنا منذ خمس سنوات», and one word, «منذ», covers both "for" and "since". English splits them: "for" goes before a length of time, and "since" before the point it started.

• I have lived here for five years. (not "I live here since five years")
• I have worked here since 2020.
• They have been married for nearly fifty years.

A finished time takes the past simple; a situation still running takes the present perfect, with for a length of time and since a starting point.

Prepositions were the third most frequent error area in Khatter's study, and they are hard for everyone, because they rarely translate one to one.

Verbs that take no preposition

Some English verbs go straight to their object where the Arabic verb uses a preposition:

• discuss something, not "discuss about something". Oxford Learner's Dictionaries notes that "discuss about" is still considered incorrect by most people, teachers and in exams, and suggests "discuss the problem" or "have a discussion about the problem".
• marry somebody or get married to somebody, the patterns Oxford gives, where Arabic says «تزوّج من».
• enter something: "Someone entered the room behind me" is Oxford's example, where Arabic can say «دخل إلى الغرفة».

Learn the preposition with its word

A preposition is easiest to learn as part of the word it belongs to, as one unit: interested in, good at, depend on, married to, arrive at a building or in a city. When you note down a new verb, adjective or noun, note its preposition with it, and an example sentence.

Discuss, marry and enter take their object directly; everything else is learned as a pair.

Arabic puts the adjective after the noun, «سيارة حمراء»; English puts it before: "a red car". The British Council lists incorrect word order of adjectives and nouns among the errors it attributes to Arabic interference.

• a red car (not "a car red")
• an important decision (not "a decision important")
• the new hospital (not "the hospital new")

An English adjective also stays the same in the plural, where an Arabic adjective agrees with its noun: "new cars", "important decisions".

Adjective first, noun second, and the adjective never takes a plural ending.

Arabic keeps a pronoun inside a relative clause; English leaves it out. In «الكتاب الذي قرأته», the «ـه» at the end of «قرأته» points back to the book. English does not repeat it, as in the British Council's example: "The laptop that I bought last week has started making a strange noise!", with no "it" after "bought".

• the book that I read (not "the book that I read it")
• the city that I grew up in, or the city where I grew up (not "the city that I grew up in it")

And the pronoun English cannot drop

The opposite happens too. After an indefinite noun, Arabic needs no relative pronoun at all: «رأيت رجلاً يبيع الكتب». English does: "I saw a man who sells books." The British Council's rule is that you can usually leave out who, which or that when a subject follows it, but not usually when a verb follows it.

No extra pronoun inside the clause, and keep who, which or that when a verb comes next.

Punctuation topped Khatter's list, and the British Council explains it from the classroom. Arabic does not have upper- and lower-case letters, so learners often mix capital and small letters within sentences and use too few full stops, and some apply Arabic punctuation rules to English and use commas where English needs a full stop.

Capital letters

English needs a capital letter at the start of every sentence, for "I", and for the names of people, places, days, months, languages and nationalities: "On Monday I flew to London." "She speaks Arabic and English." "He is Jordanian."

One sentence, one full stop

Two complete sentences cannot be joined with a comma alone. "Cars pollute the air, they also cause noise" needs a full stop ("Cars pollute the air. They also cause noise."), a semicolon, or a linking word ("Cars pollute the air, and they also cause noise.").

Long sentences joined with "and"

Abu Rass describes Arabic-speaking writers carrying Arabic style into English, including long sentences joined with coordinating conjunctions such as "and". In English a sentence usually carries one main idea. When a sentence has grown past two "and"s, split it, or use a linking word that says how the ideas relate: because, although, so, which.

A capital at the start, a full stop at the end, and one main idea in between.

Spelling was the second most frequent error area in Khatter's study, and the Arabic alphabet explains part of it. According to Britannica, the Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, all representing consonants. The long vowels are written with alif, waw and ya, and the short vowels are marked only sometimes, with diacritics, and otherwise left unwritten. English writes every vowel, and often spells the same sound more than one way.

Read the vowels on purpose

When you check your writing, read the vowels as carefully as the consonants. Bed and bad, then and than, live and leave are different words, and a spell checker will not catch the wrong one, because both are real words.

Letters you do not hear

English also has silent letters: the "s" in island, the "k" in knife, the "d" in Wednesday. The British Council notes that Arabic speakers often pronounce silent letters, as in the "s" in "island". In writing, they have to be learned word by word.

Check the vowels, then the silent letters, then the words a spell checker cannot see.

A few English sounds have no match in Arabic, and they are easy to hear. None of the Arabic alphabet's 28 letters stands for p or v. The British Council's trainer in Egypt reports that there "p" is usually pronounced as "b" and "th" as "s" or "z", while in the Gulf "v" and "f" are often confused.

That is a pattern, not a rule. A small study of ten Arab master's students of applied linguistics found they did distinguish /p/ from /b/, and concluded that the assumption Arab learners cannot produce /p/ properly did not hold for them. What they did not separate clearly were /t/ and /d/, and /k/ and /g/. Listen to your own recordings rather than assuming either way.

Two or three consonants together

Britannica notes that Arabic words always start with a single consonant followed by a vowel. English words often start with two or three: speak, street, school, spring. The British Council reports Arabic speakers adding a small vowel to break the cluster, as in "espeak" instead of "speak". Say the cluster slowly, then faster, with nothing in front of it.

Vowels

Arabic has three short and three long vowels. English distinguishes more vowel sounds than that, so practise the pairs where only the vowel changes the word, such as bed and bad, or full and fool, out loud.

The British Council adds that these pronunciation differences don't tend to cause major communication problems. They matter most where the sound changes the word.

P and b, v and f, th, and no vowel before "sp" or "st": the sounds worth recording yourself on.

A list of common mistakes tells you where to look; your own writing and speaking tell you which ones are yours.

Writing

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Speaking

Speaking is a Part 2 cue card scored from your recording on pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary and grammar: you record your answer in the browser, and the bands come back read from the audio, with the phrases that cost you quoted back. See speaking practice.

Review

Lesson, practice and placement misses come back at 1, 3, 7 and 21 days as a fresh question on the same point, so a point you got wrong once is the one you meet again. In the Arabic interface, explanations, speaking and writing tasks and feedback are in Arabic; the questions, examples and passages you learn from stay in English.

Where it stops

• Every band and level is an estimate from our own grader. No examining body has reviewed a single number, and none of them is a result you can submit anywhere. See how scoring works.
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Your own sentences, corrected and quoted back, and your own misses returned on a schedule.

Every source below was read on 22 September 2026, and every rule on this page is linked in the sentence that states it. The studies are reported from their published abstracts; the example sentences on this page were written for it.

Studies of Arabic-speaking learners

• Khatter, S. (2019). An Analysis of the Most Common Essay Writing Errors among EFL Saudi Female Learners (Majmaah University). Arab World English Journal 10(3): 40 students, three essays each; punctuation, then spelling, prepositions, articles, verb tense and word form
• Alshayban, A. S. (2012). Copula omission by EFL Arab learners. Colorado State University: 100 Saudi students; leaving out "be", more often in the present and past and at intermediate level
• Abu Rass, R. (2015). Challenges Face Arab Students in Writing Well-Developed Paragraphs in English. English Language Teaching 8(10): 205 students over fourteen years; Arabic writing style carried into English
• Abdelaal, N. M. (2017). Instrumental Analysis of the English Stops Produced by Arabic Speakers of English. International Journal of Education and Literacy Studies 5(3): ten students; /p/ and /b/ distinguished, /t/ and /d/ and /k/ and /g/ less so

British Council, Oxford and Britannica

• British Council, Tips for teaching English to Arabic speakers: the alphabet, capitals and punctuation, "be", the present perfect, word order and sounds
• British Council LearnEnglish, articles, present perfect and defining relative clauses: the English rules
• Oxford Learner's Dictionaries: discuss, marry and enter
• Britannica: Arabic alphabet and Arabic language

Liguastic sources

• Writing feedback and speaking practice: what comes back and in what form
• How scoring works: what is measured, what is not, and where the method is weaker
• About: the promises the site holds itself to

Method

1. Read each study at its published record, and report only what the record states.
2. Take each English rule from the British Council or Oxford, and each fact about Arabic from Britannica or the British Council.
3. Write the example sentences for this page, and check each one against those rules.
4. Check every claim about Liguastic against the product rather than its marketing, and re-read every source on each refresh.

What this page cannot tell you: the studies are small and local, so no figure here describes Arabic speakers as a whole, and pronunciation differs between countries and dialects, as the British Council article itself says. Cambridge's pages on learner errors refused automated access on the day this was written, so they are not cited. If anything here is wrong or has changed, write to hello@liguastic.com and we will check it and correct the page.

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