8 English Sentences: Find the Mistakes

Hi, my name's Rebecca. For the next few minutes, let's pretend you are the English teacher

and you're correcting your student's homework. Let's look at some of these sentences and

see if you can find some of the errors in these English sentences.

Okay, the first sentence: "My mother she works in a bank."

Is that okay?

Well, let me tell you right now that actually none of these sentences are okay; there is

a mistake in every sentence. So see if you can find the mistake. Okay?

"My mother she works in a bank." What's the mistake? Okay... Here, "she", all

right? I'm just going to grab a different marker. So what happened here is we said:

"My mother she works in a bank." So we cannot repeat the subject. The mistake here is that

we had a double subject; the subject was mentioned twice. In English, you can't do that. You

just mention the subject once. So this sentence, in order to be correct, would need to be:

"My mother works in a bank." Or: "She works in a bank." If you know who "she" is. Right?

But you can't say both. So no double subjects.

Number two: "John is an engineer"

What's wrong with that? Look carefully. Well, what's wrong is that it's missing the punctuation.

All right? Part of a correct sentence is correct punctuation. So here, there was no period

at the end of the sentence, that's what was wrong.

Next sentence: "The manager of my department"

What's wrong with that? Well, what's wrong is that it's not a sentence because it doesn't

have any verb, there's no verb there. Okay? And, of course, you need to continue this

sentence, and then eventually you'd need to have some punctuation as well. But basically,

there is no... This is a sentence fragment. This is called only a part of a sentence.

It is not a complete English sentence or a correct English sentence. There is no verb.

Missing verb.

Next one: "we enjoy watching old movies."

Okay? Again, look carefully. What's wrong there? Well, it has a subject, it has a verb,

but this is the problem. The first letter in the first word of an English sentence has

to be capitalized and that's what was missing here. You see, we didn't have that problem

before. Okay.

Next one: "I like very much Chinese food."

Okay? Maybe that sounds okay to you, but doesn't sound okay to me. It's close, but not quite.

What's wrong? Well, what's wrong here is this, the word order. Not only do you need to have

certain elements, you need to have the words in the right order. So in English, the correct

order for this sentence would be: "I like Chinese food very much." Okay? Not: "very

much Chinese food." "I like Chinese food very much." Okay?

Next: "Maria need help with her hw."

"Maria need help with her homework." What's wrong there? Okay? So the mistake is here,

the mistake is in subject-verb agreement. The verb has to agree with the subject. Right?

And if we say: "Maria", it's like: "she", and we would have to say: "She needs". "Maria

needs help with her hw." So the error here was in subject-verb agreement.

Next one: "delivered the package yesterday"

Okay? "delivered the package yesterday" What's wrong here? Well, it's similar to this one,

except here, we had a sentence fragment and we had the subject. Here, we have a sentence

fragment, and we have a verb, but we don't have a subject. We have a missing subject.

So this is also a sentence fragment. "Fragment" means only part. It is not a complete sentence.

Next one: "We recieved your letter."

"We recieved your letter." Sounds fine, but if you're an English teacher, you're going

to look really carefully at each of the words. And what's wrong is here, the mistake is here.

It's a spelling mistake. Okay? The word "received" is one of those tricky words with the "e"

and the "i", and the "i" and the "e" that you have to learn very well.

So spelling mistakes will also bring down your marks. If you're doing the IELTS, if

you're bring... Doing the TOEFL, any errors of this kind will bring your marks down. Okay?

So even though they seem very basic, I know from experience that students make all of

these mistakes. Be very careful not to make them.

Let's look at what principles apply to correct English sentences. Okay? So, an English sentence

must express a complete thought and it must express it with certain elements. Now, just

because a sentence must express a complete thought, it doesn't have to have a lot of

words; it doesn't have to be a very long sentence.

Let me give you an example of a perfect English sentence which is not long. And here we are,

this is an example: "Babies cry."

Let me explain to you why this is a perfectly correct English sentence. So, an English sentence

has to have a subject. The subject in this sentence is: "Babies". An English sentence

has to mention the subject once. Here, it's only mentioned once. We don't say: "Babies

they cry." We just say: "Babies cry." And a sentence has to have a verb. What's the

verb in this sentence? "Cry". A sentence has to have subject-verb agreement. So, in this

case, we said: "Babies cry." It's correct. We didn't say: "Babies cries", or anything

like that. There is subject-verb agreement. A correct sentence should have a capital letter.

Okay? At the start of the sentence. And we do, so that's fine. A correct English sentence

should have punctuation at the end, which we have, we have a period. It should be correct

word order, which we have. We didn't say: "Cry babies", which means something else.

We said: "Babies cry." That was fine. And spelling. Okay? The word "babies" is spelled

correctly, the word "cry" is spelled correctly.

So these points are all the points that you need to keep in mind when you're constructing

an English sentence. Make sure you do that and you don't lose marks unnecessarily on

your exams by making one of these basic errors. All right? If you'd like to do some more practice

on this, please go to our website: www.engvid.com. Thanks very much for watching, and

good luck with your English.