When a Russian or Hebrew speaker makes a mistake in English, it is rarely a sign of carelessness. Your brain is quietly translating the structure of your native language — and English simply doesn't work the same way. That is actually good news: predictable errors are the easiest kind to correct, because you can learn the one rule that fixes a whole family of mistakes. Here are the ten that come up most, with a clear fix for each.
Articles: a, an, the
Russian has no articles at all, and Hebrew marks "the" but has nothing like a/an — so learners either drop articles entirely or sprinkle "the" everywhere. English needs one before most singular countable nouns. Use a/an when you introduce something new or non-specific, and the when both speaker and listener know which one you mean.
- a book — one book, any book, mentioned for the first time
- the book — the specific book we already talked about
- books are useful / water is cheap — no article with general plurals and uncountables
The missing verb "to be"
Both Russian and Hebrew usually drop the present-tense verb "to be", so "He is a doctor" comes out as "He doctor" and "I am hungry" becomes "I hungry". In English the verb is never optional in the present. Say "He is a doctor" and "I am hungry" — the little am / is / are is doing real grammatical work and cannot be skipped.
The rest of the top ten are quick to fix once you notice them. Keep this list somewhere you can glance at it:
- Prepositions: they don't map one-to-one from your language — depend on, interested in, listen to, arrive at a place / in a city.
- Make vs do: you make a decision, a mistake, a plan; you do homework, the dishes, a job.
- Present simple vs continuous: "agree" is not an action in progress — say "I agree", never "I am agree".
- Much / many: use many with countable nouns (many books) and much with uncountable ones (much time).
- Double negatives: one negative is enough — "I don't know anything", not "I don't know nothing".
- Question word order: inside a sentence the order goes back to normal — "Do you know where it is?", not "…where is it?".
- False friend "actually": it means "in fact / really", not "currently". For "now", use currently or at the moment.
- Fun vs funny: fun = enjoyable; funny = makes you laugh. A party is fun; a joke is funny.
- Say vs tell: you tell someone something, but you say something (to someone) — "tell me", "say it".
Notice how nearly every item traces back to a single habit from Russian or Hebrew. That is exactly why these errors are fixable: you are not learning a hundred random rules, you are retraining a few predictable reflexes. Correct one a week, and in a couple of months the whole list quietly disappears.