Language Errors In English

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The most likely areas of errors made by Polish learners of English. The most complicated and the longest process of language acquisition is the process of learning the first language (L1). Then, on its basis we learn any other language (L2) with more or less difficulties, depending on its similarity to our mother tongue. In the case of Polish beginners learning English, the mistakes they do derive mainly from the different roots of the languages – both of them are classified as Indo-European, but aside from that very general level of division Polish and English have little in common. English comes from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family while Polish is a part of the Balto-Slavic one, which divides them very early on. The gap…show more content…
The concept of articles does not exist in Polish language, which results in incorrectly placed “a/ an/ the” before nouns with very little room for improvement because at the point of second language acquisition, introducing new grammatical theories results more in the confusion of the user, rather than in accomplishment. It is remarkably similar in terms of tenses. Present Perfect is a tense that has no counterpart in Polish language and even advanced Polish learners tend to have problems with its application. Cambridge Online Dictionary defines present perfect as “the form of the verb used for actions or events that have been completed or have happened in a period of time up to now.” The problem in the eyes of Polish learner lies in the correct usage of the mentioned tense, which is troubling because the sentence “Powiedziałam mu.” can be translated either as “I told him.” or “I have told him.” and the difference between both can be surprisingly miniscule or unimportant. Also, the creation of questions in different tenses often causes problems, when Polish learners tend to be hypercorrect and make mistakes by applying patterns while using the verb “be”, like in the arrangement of questions in Past Simple – e.g. “Did you go to school?”; often urges Polish learners to use the formulation “Did you were at school?” rather than “Were you at…show more content…
The only way to do that is to mimic the native speakers, what is often impossible in our environment. The great number of teachers of English are Polish learners themselves and thus, they not only cannot teach people the entirely correct pronounciation because their own pronounciation is not always right, on the behalf of English being their second language, they make mistakes themselves and they rely them further. Moreover, the problem lies also in the supply of sounds that make up the phonetic alphabet in both languages. The most occurring is the problem of the English sound “ə” called “szwa”, which is a vowel that has no correlating sound in Polish phonetic alphabet. Polish learners have much more trouble with using it than with the sounds that somehow appear in Polish or even the ones that only slightly recall similar

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