Avoid these COMMON grammar MISTAKES when speaking English

- If you're making these common mistakes

in your IELTS speaking test,

then you're bringing your score down.

Let me help you fix them

so your score can go up.

Let's do it.

(gentle music)

- Hi, so this is Keith from the Keith Speaking Academy

and English Speaking Success.

I'm here to help you speak better English,

give better answers and get a higher score

on the IELTS speaking test.

So listen, having taught IELTS for a number of years, right?

I see students making a lot of the same mistakes

Now, you see, I think if you know what these mistakes are,

then you will be ready to hear them

and to correct them.

So in this video,

I'm gonna be telling you six of the most common

grammar mistakes students make when speaking.

And as an added bonus at the end,

I'll tell you five of the most common communication mistakes

English students make.

On top of that,

I also want to share with you a super cool mobile app.

It's called Woodpecker Learning.

I think you're gonna love it because it makes

studying fun and learning deep.

Some students even say it's head

and shoulders above YouTube. (laughs)

You can soon find out.

I'm gonna tell you more about that shortly.

First of all, let's get into those mistakes.

Okay, let's jump in with the first mistake.

Can you spot the mistake here?

I came to London to work

and now I live here for five months.

Hmm.

What do you think?

Right, let me show you where the problem is, right?

The problem is with 'live' in the present tense.

I came to London to work in the past.

Yes, I live here now,

but if I'm telling you how long I have lived here,

you need the present perfect.

What it should be is,

I came to London to work and now I have lived here

for five months,

or I've lived here for five months, right?

So the point is,

if you've got an activity that started in the past,

coming to London or living in London,

it continues until now.

And you're now telling how long

that activity lasted.

Then it's the present perfect, right?

You can see in the timeline,

came to London five months ago.

I live in London.

I've lived here for five months.

Or I've lived here since February.

I've lived here for is with a duration of time.

I've lived here since is with a point in time.

That's it.

Listen out for it.

Take care, correct it in the future.

Let's move on.

One,

two,

three,

four.

Well, listen, do you go down to the gym?

Do you like to work out?

Oh, great stuff, right?

Well, listen, the next mistake is all about that.

And in this example, there are actually two mistakes,

one in each phrase,

but it's a similar mistake.

Let's have a look.

He usually go alone to the gym.

He do not go with his friends.

Can you see the mistake?

Let me help you and show you where the mistake is.

With 'go'

and 'do', right?

I'm sure you can see it, right?

What it should be of course is,

he usually goes alone to the gym

and he does not go alone.

So remember the third person that's he, she or it,

then it must take s on the verb, right?

He goes to the gym.

The problem often is

that you know the grammar,

but you forget to pronounce it.

He go to the gym.

It sounds right, but it's not.

He goes to the gym.

He works out.

He goes alone.

He enjoys himself.

So when you're practicing,

make sure you overemphasize the 's'.

He works out.

He goes to the gym.

And then it will become more of a habit.

Notice in the negatives with it, he or she,

we don't use do, we use does.

You can think of it that the s goes on the do.

So there's still an s, right, does.

He does not go alone.

In the negative we contract.

He doesn't, he doesn't go alone.

Can you say that?

He doesn't go alone.

That's it.

Perfect.

Now, sometimes what happens is

students learn the 's' and they focus so much on the 's'.

They're dreaming. (chuckles)

They're dreaming about the s

then what happens is suddenly there's a shower of s's

and you get something like these mistakes.

Does he goes alone?

In the question.

Can you see the mistake?

The mistake is around goes, right?

What it should be is, does he go alone?

But suddenly it's raining s's

because you're focusing so much on the s.

But remember there's only one s, right.

So if you use does,

that's where the s is not on the verb.

So in questions, does he go alone?

Got it?

Got it.

Brilliant.

17 more to go.

29,

30. (chuckles)

Whoa, so many things to watch!

Vikings is quite good.

Have you seen it on Netflix?

I haven't seen "Bridgerton" yet.

Might be worth watching.

What do you like on Netflix?

Ah, right.

Yep.

Fair enough.

Yep, yep.

Well, that brings me into our next mistake, okay.

Let's have a look again, two phrases,

a mistake in each one,

the same kind of mistake.

Let's see if you can spot it.

I'm liking this Netflix series.

I'm having a big family.

What's the mistake?

And I can help you out.

I'll show you where the mistake is.

It's with liking and having,

it's the tense.

Of course, right?

What it should be is,

I like this Netflix series,

or I have a big family,

why?

Because some verbs

such as like and have

rarely take the present continuous tense.

The present continuous tense is be plus the verb

with the ing.

I

am liking,

right?

Normally we don't use like with the present continuous,

because like is about a state

rather than an action.

Present continuous tense is about an action.

I'm doing it now, right?

So we normally say,

I like this Netflix series.

Now it's true that sometimes it does happen, right?

For example, do you remember McDonald's?

Pa ra pa pa pa,

I'm loving it.

I'm loving it.

Right?

I'm loving the food now.

It's describing an action.

Like when you're watching a series of you go,

"I'm loving this series."

If you're describing the action, you can,

but if it's a state, right,

I like this series,

we use like in the present simple.

Now there is a group of verbs that normally,

not always, but normally

do not go with the present continuous tense.

And they include verbs like,

like, love,

prefer, hate,

believe or know,

you very rarely say, I'm knowing everything.

No, because normally it's a state, right?

I know everything.

I understand.

I understand what you're saying.

I realize,

want or wish.

So these usually take the present simple tense.

Great.

Let's move on.

Guys if you're enjoying the videos so far,

please do remember to subscribe and turn on

the notifications, right.

Now, do you know what?

One of the most surprising things that I learned

in my teacher training,

many, many years ago,

was that it's not always a good idea to correct

students' mistakes.

I know.

Strange, right?

I always thought, we must correct students all the time.

Well, no, apparently there's quite a lot of research

that shows that correcting students

all the time is not effective.

And the very often students just go on

to commit, to commit,

to make the same mistakes again and again.

(air whooshing)

But, of course, it is important as a teacher

to correct sometimes,

but we have to take into account the context, the emotion,

the student's learning style and things like that.

Secondly, talking about correcting mistakes,

there's a very interesting saying, right?

And I think this is a Chinese saying,

somebody told me it was from the Tao Te Ching

from Lao Tze.

Maybe our Chinese colleagues can let me know.

It says, "When the student is ready,

the teacher appears."

Meaning

that if the student is not ready,

the teacher cannot really help the student,

which is the problem, right?

If the teacher's correcting you

and you're not ready to hear it,

you're not gonna listen.

It's only when the student is ready,

then teacher appears and the teacher can help the student.

And that is really important for correcting mistakes,

'cause it suggests to me

that actually one of the best ways

to correct your mistakes is self-correction,

is you correcting yourself, right?

If you can be aware of the common mistakes,

like the ones we're seeing today, right.

If you can record yourself speaking,

notice the mistakes and correct them,

it's one of the most effective ways

of self-correction and getting better.

I think the other important thing you can do

is expose yourself so to speak,

to lots of English,

to lots of natural English, which brings me on

a nice segue into my next point.

I want to tell you a bit about this wonderful mobile app

called Woodpecker Learning.

Yes, Woodpecker like the bird.

I'm not sure why,

but it's an interesting name.

Now with Woodpecker Learning, it's fantastic

'cause it makes learning English fun and engaging.

It has over 300,000 videos

brought together in the app from different sources.

All the videos have got transcripts

and subtitles and you can use the videos to study.

You can, if you don't understand a word,

you can look it up in the subtitles to see its meaning.

And also you can repeat phrases again and again, and again,

to help you improve your pronunciation

and your understanding and learning.

It's great.

Let me show you briefly how it works.

Okay, so we can download the app for free.

Here we are inside the mobile phone version.

On the front page, you've got all these videos

organized by category,

edutainment trailers and reviews, food,

talk shows, I'm into food.

I'm gonna have a look at one of the food videos.

Oh, look at that lemon and blueberry tart.

Listen, can't resist.

Let's have a look at this.

So you get the video, right?

And then you can see you've got the subtitles.

- It's my birthday.

- Let me just go straight back to the beginning.

- Just like cleaning the windscreen on a car.

- Just like cleaning the windscreen on a car.

What's a windscreen?

Let me click on that.

Ah, a windscreen, a transparent screen made a glass

located at the front of a vehicle.

Oh, wind screen.

It stops the wind.

That's good.

Let me add that to my dictionary, to my history,

I can collect the words I'm studying.

Brilliant!

And we can listen.

(gentle music)

- Hello everybody, it's Barry here.

Hope you,

you, right.

You, yeah.

Welcome to my kitchen today.

We are making, so I'm quite selfish.

I'm being very selfish today.

Lemon and blueberry tart.

- Let's practice that.

- Lemon and blueberry tart.

It's my birthday.

- A lemon and blueberry tart.

Hang on.

This is really important. - Lemon and blueberry tart.

- Lemon-

- [Both] And blueberry tart.

Lemon and blueberry tart.

- Got it.

I wanna make sure I get that right

when I go to the restaurant.

We can repeat phrases and repeat them again.

Fantastic!

Absolutely brilliant!

You've also got in here a web browser

if you want to go into different webpages,

for example, the BBC

and that function of looking at words you don't know,

you can do it in the web browser as well.

So maybe you're reading an article.

This is about the ooh, yes.

And we look at breached;

a gap or opening made.

Great.

Brilliant!

We can look at words in the browser as well

on your mobile phone.

Lots to do here.

Woodpecker Learning videos, reading websites,

looking at words, practicing your English.

Great!

(air whooshing)

Go and check the links down below.

You can download the app for free

and you can start practicing straight away,

improving your English.

Right now, Let's get back into those mistakes.

Now mistake number four.

Imagine if you will,

the scenario,

Tom

is going to visit Janet.

Tom

tall,

dark hair,

handsome,

blue eyes,

nice glasses

goes to Janet's house.

He's chasing Janet, right?

He wants Janet to be his girlfriend.

But Janet lives with her mother

and Tom

goes

to visit Janet

at Janet's mother's house.

And this is what happens.

Tom says,

"Is Janet home?"

Janet's mum says,

"No, I'm sorry,

she has been to London.

What's the mistake?

Well, you may say that Tom's mistake

is to try and chase a girl

who lives with her mother (chuckles)

because the mother will never allow it.

But what's the grammatical mistake?

Or let me give you a clue.

It's around the word been.

That's right

What it should be is Tom says,

"Is Janet home?"

Janet's mum should say if she spoke correct English,

"No, I'm sorry, she has gone to London."

She's gone to London, right?

So what's happening here is that

with the verb to go,

there are two past participles, right?

There's been, which means she went

and came back,

and then there's gone,

which means she went and she's still there.

So if you say she's been to London,

it means she went to London and she came back.

That now is part of her life experience.

If you say, she's gone to London,

she went and she's still there.

So, of course, Janet's mother should say,

"Oh no, Janet, can't speak to you.

"She's gone to London and she's still in London."

Right?

But of course the big problem is Janet's mother

doesn't like Tom.

Poor Tom.

Our problem is to solve the use here

of been and gone in the present perfect tense.

So you can see the difference?

Nice.

Let's move on.

Now mistake

number five.

There is a very famous poem actually

by a man you may know called Rudyard Kipling.

It's a wonderful poem.

And it's called "If"

and it goes a bit like this.

If you can keep your head,

when all about you are losing theirs

and blaming it on you.

If you can trust yourself,

when all men doubt you,

if you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

if you can meet triumph, hooray, and disaster,

ooh, (laughs)

and treat those two imposters, just the same,

If you can do all of this,

then yours is the earth and everything that's in it,

and, which is more,

you'll be a man, my son.

That's the short version.

It's a fantastic poem.

And it's all about Rudyard as a father

giving advice to his son.

If you can do this,

everything will be great.

You know, you should do that.

You'd better do that.

If I were you, I'd do this.

Lots of advice.

Parents love giving advice.

Sometimes children don't like receiving it,

but we still like to give it.

The next mistake

see if you can spot what it is.

My dad is always giving me lots of advices.

I'm giving you a clue.

The mistake is with the word advices.

That's right.

Advice is uncountable

noun.

You cannot count it,

therefore, you cannot have a plural, right?

It should be,

my dad is always giving me lots of advice.

Must be in the singular because it's uncountable.

There are lots of uncountable nouns that are very,

very common in IELTS speaking topics

and that most students put into the plural

because probably in your own language,

it exists in the plural, right?

For example furniture,

there's lots of furniture.

A lots of students say,

"Oh, there's many furnitures in my house."

And I say, "No, there's not.

And they say, "Yes, there is.

"There's a chair, there's a table, there's a sofa,

"There's many furnitures."

"No, there's not."

"No, no, no, there is." (laughs)

I know there is

but in English you have to say,

there is a lot of furniture.

You can't count it.

You can count the pieces of furniture.

There's three pieces of furniture.

But if you use the uncountable noun

it must be in the singular.

Similar for news, information, knowledge research, right?

I'm doing lots of researches.

No, you're not. (laughs)

You're doing lots of research.

Work, I've got lots of works to do.

No, you don't have a rest.

You've got a lot of work to do.

Equipment, luggage, pollution, furniture,

whether, all of these, right, are uncountable nouns.

So when you hear them,

that little red light comes on and you think,

ah, singular.

Great.

Thanks, Keith. (laughs)

Let's move on.

Hello, and welcome to mistake number six.

Now,

ooh, hang on.

(knocking)

Wait a minute.

You look very familiar.

Your face rings a bell.

What's your name again?

All right, and where do you live?

Ah, do you like it there?

Okay, and how many time have you lived there?

Right, and I wonder how long time will you

stay there in the future.

Okay.

Now, hang on a minute.

Something's strange is afoot. (laughs)

something strange is happening.

Not a foot like a foot, but afoot, one word.

Something strange is happening.

There's some strange questions there.

Let's have a look at the two mistakes

in these following two sentences.

Number one, how many time have you lived here?

Number two, how long time have you lived here?

What's the mistake?

And my clue is the mistake is around the word

time in both of them.

Okay.

So listen, what the correct sentence should be

for both of them is how long have you lived here?

How long have you lived here?

Okay.

We never say, how long the time, right?

It's just how long.

I know how long can mean distance as well

but because of the context, it's clear

how long have you lived here, do not say time.

In the first one, how many time?

Time, of course, right, is uncountable (laughs)

in this context.

How much time?

You can say how much time,

but here we wouldn't use it.

Why not?

It doesn't sound natural.

We tend to use how much time

when we're talking about shorter periods of time, right?

For example, how much time do I need to finish this exam?

Maybe two hours or three hours, right?

Or how much time does it take to boil an egg?

Three minutes maybe.

So how much time is a very specific,

normally a short period of time.

But when we're using longer periods of time

and particularly the present perfect, right?

How long, how long have you lived here?

How long have you worked here?

Just how long.

Much more natural, much better.

Drop time. (chuckles)

Forget time.

How long have you lived here?

That's what it should be.

So you can ask me a question

with how long.

I won't answer, because I can't hear you,

but I'll move on to the next point. (chuckles)

Right, next for that bonus.

I'd like to give you five of the most common

communication mistakes that I see, right, very quickly.

And this is communication either

in an IELTS speaking test or a mock test,

all with students just communicating in everyday life,

maybe with colleagues or in the workplace

or something like that, okay.

The first one, being afraid of mistakes,

which means often trying to create perfect sentences

very, very slowly.

Students get nervous about mistakes.

It puts pressure on them

and therefore they make more mistakes.

Listen, mistakes are going to happen, accept it

When you're practicing, slow down,

try and speak accurately.

But when you're doing the test

or you're communicating in everyday life,

get the balance between fluency and accuracy.

Be alert, but do accept mistakes will happen.

It's fine.

(air whooshing)

Number two, speaking too quietly.

And of course this is sometimes to do with

lack of confidence.

And the problem is

it really brings down your communication skills.

So raise your voice,

speak a little more loudly than maybe you normally would do.

It'll really help you.

Number three, speaking too quickly.

This often happens and it shows a lack of control

of pronunciation features, blah, blah, blah.

If this is a problem you have,

slow down, break down your pronunciation,

try and work with chunks

that use pauses much more often

as you're speaking the way I do,

listen to me,

I use pauses all the time,

it can really help you.

(air whooshing)

Number four, speaking with a monotonous voice,

lacking emotion.

Sometimes this comes from using

your first language intonation,

which may be much flatter than English intonation.

English intonation tends to be a bit la di di di

It bounces up and down.

It can be quite melodic,

not as melodic as some languages,

some Latin languages,

maybe Italian and Spanish are much more melodic,

but English has a certain kind of intonation.

So just be aware when you're speaking,

give a bit of emotion,

give a bit of a liveliness to your speaking.

Number five, bad eye contact.

Especially in a test or again in everyday life

some people get nervous

and then suddenly the eye contact is all over the place.

It's maybe completely avoiding the person

you're speaking to

or it's looking at them very intensely and then.

Eye contact is a really difficult thing.

There are no rules about it.

But the more relaxed you are,

making some eye contact now and again,

you can move away,

but come back and then

maybe thinking, and then come back, right?

So not too much

and not too little. (chuckles)

That's it, five communication mistakes.

(air whooshing)

So watch out for these grammar mistakes

and communication mistakes.

And as you start correcting them,

you will be well on your way

to improving your overall communication skills

and getting a higher score in IELTS speaking.

Remember, do check out the Woodpecker Learning mobile app.

I think it's fantastic.

You will love it.

You can start learning,

having fun watching the things that you enjoy watching,

helping you learn more deeply.

You can check out the links below.

You can download it for free,

start practicing, start learning,

and do remember if you keep your learning fun,

you'll be learning at a much deeper level.

And so you will move from

being just another English student

to being a confident English speaker.

And I hope I can help you on your journey.

So I look forward to seeing you very soon

in the next video.

Please do remember to subscribe,

turn on the notifications

and I will see you in a few seconds.

Also leave me a comment below.

Let me know

what mistakes do you make in English

or what things do you often confuse

when speaking in English?

Let me know in the comments below.

Great, speak to you soon.

Bye-bye.

(gentle music)