The English Mistake That Drives Me CRAZY || STOP Making These CRINGE English Mistakes

The  English Mistake That Drives Me CRAZY || STOP Making These CRINGE English Mistakes

Welcome to Mind Life In English, hosted by Profe Lao.

Are you making common English mistakes without even realizing it? In this episode, we'll explore one of the most frequent English speaking mistakes that many learners make and show you how to avoid it with simple, practical explanations.

You'll learn the correct way to use everyday English in real conversations, understand why these mistakes happen, and discover natural alternatives that native and fluent English speakers commonly use. By recognizing and correcting these errors, you'll improve your grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and overall speaking confidence.

This lesson is designed to help English learners communicate more clearly and naturally in everyday situations. Whether you're preparing for conversations, job interviews, travel, academic studies, or professional communication, the tips in this episode will help you sound more fluent and confident.

Throughout the episode, you'll hear useful examples, practical sentence patterns, and easy-to-understand explanations that you can apply immediately in your daily English practice. Listening regularly and practicing these corrections will help you build stronger communication skills and avoid repeating common mistakes.

This episode is suitable for beginner, intermediate, and advanced English learners who want to take their spoken English to the next level.

Follow Mind Life In English for more educational episodes featuring English speaking practice, listening exercises, vocabulary building, grammar tips, pronunciation improvement, and real-world English conversations.

Hosted by Profe Lao.

Keywords:
English Mistakes, Common English Mistakes, Learn English, Spoken English, English Speaking Practice, English Grammar, English Vocabulary, English Pronunciation, English Conversation, Everyday English, English Fluency, English Communication Skills, English for Beginners, Education Podcast, Mind Life In English, Profe Lao.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In this video, I'm going to talk about the number one thing that drives me crazy, absolutely crazy, that people who are learning languages say and think and believe that is self-sabotage. They are sabotaging their progress in learning the language and becoming fluent. And it's crazy to me that people, so many people really don't know this or have thought about this before. So first I'm gonna passionately rant about that, and then we're gonna take a look at my YouTube comment section and find some mistakes, some English mistakes that a lot of you make, and I'm gonna help you fix them. So you need to watch this entire video if you're serious about leveling up your English, because I'm sure you make at least one of these mistakes. Yeah, you, I'm looking at you. Don't avoid eye contact. I'm looking at you. I see you. Now sit down and pay attention. You know, I'm just messing with you, but if you're serious about your English, sit down because class is about to start. Okay, I'm gonna read you a very lovely comment written by one of my Brazilian viewers. I got a lot of you out there. Oi gang she. This person wrote, I understand everything you said. Fantastic. I'm Brazilian living in Portugal, so I barely have the chance to practice speaking. I work with clients, okay, and then she's talking more about her life. Even though I write and understand very well, I feel completely dumb when I start to speak. Ha ha ha. Can you explain why this happens, please? And what's your advice to unlock fluent speaking? Thank you so much. Thank you. Alright, now I'm not picking on this person because I've seen a million comments like this. I've had a million students ask me about this. I'm just using this as an example. But this, this right here is the thing that drives me crazy, and I'm gonna explain why. Specifically, this line. So I barely have the chance to practice speaking. All right, I'm gonna rant a little bit. Do you know what ranting is? If you don't know what ranting is, I'm gonna put the definition on the screen. I use it a lot. It's good to rant about things. Sometimes I like to rant. So I'm gonna rant for a minute. Try to keep up, try to stay with me. I am a person who is kind of naturally autodidactic. I've just always been this way as long as I can remember. It's very intuitive for me. It's very easy to just know automatically what I need to do to learn a language. I also grew up in the time of internet. I am 27. When I decided that I wanted to seriously study Spanish and Portuguese, I already knew that the number one thing that I need to do, and really the only thing I need to do to learn this language, is basically what children do. I need to expose myself to the language. I need to listen to how native speakers talk, and I need to imitate them. You are imitating them. That's why babies and kids they learn even the same accent as their parents. So you need to channel that. You need to go into that mode mentally. There is no such thing as I don't have the chance to practice speaking. That doesn't exist. I don't want to hear anybody say that again. That belief needs to be thrown in the trash. The problem is that people are associating speaking with conversation with another person, and they are not separating those things. They think that those go together and they cannot be separated. But that's exactly what you need to do. You need to separate them. You need to practice speaking, you need to approach the practice of speaking the same way you approach practicing your guitar by yourself, practicing a sport, an instrument, a yoga, anything, anything that you do that you practice by yourself, you need to approach your language speaking in the same way. 99% of the way that I learned Spanish and Portuguese was by watching content, listening to content of native speakers talking in Spanish, in Portuguese, on the internet, pausing, listening again, imitating them, repeating, trying to copy them exactly the way they said it. Most of the content I watched was content for native speakers. It was random YouTube channels of Brazilian girls doing their makeup, which I don't even wear makeup, but I found it fascinating. To this Mexican guy that used to make cooking videos. He used to like show himself making food. I used to watch this funny Dominican guy who made all these comedy videos, like making fun of his mom and the way that his mom was when he was growing up. I used to watch the same content that Spanish and Portuguese speakers watch: YouTube videos, TikTok videos, Instagram reels, some movies and shows, if they were not too difficult. Some movies and shows are easier than others. You have to find the easier ones, because some are really hard, yes. And I'm sitting there in my room with my little tablet or my phone or my laptop or whatever, and I'm pausing and I'm imitating, imitating, imitating. That is how I learn these languages. The concept of I don't have a chance to speak never occurred to me. It never existed, even though I was actually living among English speakers at the time. I was living in a house of English speakers, and my job was in English, and most of my daily conversations were in English. But I created a Spanish and Portuguese speaking bubble for myself. And trust me, the more you do that by yourself with the internet, the easier it will be when it comes time to have a conversation with a real person, with a native speaker in real life. Nowadays, with the internet, there is no more. I don't have a chance to practice speaking. I don't have a chance to be exposed to native speakers. This doesn't exist. I'm saying it again for emphasis. I've said this before in other videos. I'm gonna say it again. The only way to get better at something is just to do it again and again and again and again. Even if it's hard, you just keep doing it. Every great musician started by learning the basics on an instrument. And maybe it was even hard for them in the beginning. Probably. That's the same thing with any kind of exercise or whatever. Maybe you can only do a couple push-ups today. But if you keep doing those couple push-ups, it'll get easier and then you can do more. I think another problem is that people don't realize how much time and exposure and practice it takes to really master a language. I'm like eight years into my Spanish and I feel confident with my Spanish, but there's still a lot of things that I am not sure about, I don't know about. I am constantly asking my friends, how should I say this? What should I say here? What is this? So yeah, I think people are just busy and they just want to know the language now, they want to be confident in the language now, and they don't realize how much it really takes. You gotta be patient. All right, I think I've talked about this enough. Bottom line, I'm gonna say it again. There is no such thing as I don't have the chance to speak. Stop saying this, stop believing this, start speaking. And if you're at the point where you're ready to talk to a native speaker, well, you can take a conversation class with me, or you can go to any of the websites with hundreds of teachers, hundreds of native speakers that you can take conversation classes with. On my YouTube page, I have a link to schedule classes with me, and I have an iTalky link, which is a discount link to take classes with other people, with other native speakers. So even if your problem is that you want to talk to a native speaker and you don't think you have the opportunity, yes, you do. You just have to pay for that, obviously, because you're paying for somebody's time. But honestly, sometimes I feel like I get more out of studying a language for free watching a video and practicing speaking by myself than even talking to someone. Sometimes I can learn more just by watching a video and imitating it than trying to have a conversation. And even if you are taking classes with native speakers, you need to also be practicing speaking by yourself as well. And if the idea of practicing speaking by myself bothers you, don't think of it like that. Don't think of it as I'm talking to myself. You're not talking to yourself. You're just imitating what you hear. It's the same thing as listening to your favorite song and singing along to the lyrics. It's just like that. It's just like singing along with your favorite song. You're listening to native speakers talk in a video and you're imitating them or a podcast or whatever it is. It's just imitation. It's not talking to yourself. Yes, you can talk to yourself, but if you don't want to do that, you can just imitate. That's gonna be the most efficient and productive thing you can do to improve your language skills. Comprehensible input and output. Imitate. That's it. If I had to choose one word that you need in your language learning journey, it's probably the word imitation. That is the golden word right there. That's it. All right, I already said I was done talking about that, but then I kept going. Anyways, okay, now for real, I'm done. Let's move on. All right, now let's look at some English mistakes in my comment section. This is really my favorite part. Okay, we got another big paragraph. I don't want to read the whole thing. I don't want to look for all the mistakes in this paragraph because there are several. I don't want to do that. There are two specific mistakes that I want to talk about today. The first one, as a non-native, I can say I was always afraid about my English level. Okay, so you can see the way this person wrote about. They wrote about with the apostrophe, the little line. This is a great example of students trying a little bit too hard to be like a native speaker, but then not actually being like a native speaker. Yes, when we speak, sometimes it sounds like bout instead of about. And yes, sometimes native speakers might write about like this, but it's not as common as you think. Most of the time we just write about. It's not faster to write about. I mean, it's one letter difference. And in this case, he even wrote the apostrophe, so it's like another character. So it's not even, it's not even less characters. It's still five. He had to type five things. So it's the same. Native speakers are just gonna write about most of the time. Just about. All right, and then at the end of the paragraph, the last thing they said was, you rock, lady. Now, thank you for the compliment and I appreciate it. Thanks for saying that I rock. I notice a lot of students say that, like you rock. It is a phrase that native speakers use sometimes, but it's not as common anymore as it used to be. But I'll let that one slide. It's not a big deal, but yeah, it's not as common as I think students think it is. But whatever, that's not really the thing that I want to talk about here. The problem with you rock lady is the lady. This is something that a lot of students don't know, I think, or they they haven't ever heard before. So I'm gonna explain it to you using Spanish and Portuguese as a reference, like Latin-based languages, because that's what I know, and I know a lot of you guys speak those languages. In a language like Spanish, for example, you have the word senora or senorita. You can use this word to talk about someone like esa senora, like that woman, that lady over there, and you can also use it to talk to someone directly. You can call someone senora or senorita. In English, we don't have this. We don't have one word like this that you can use to talk to someone directly and talk about them. We have two different words. We have ma'am and lady, and they are used differently. So ma'am is for talking to someone directly. Personally, I don't use it because I'm from the north and in my family, my culture, it's just not common. So I didn't grow up saying ma'am, we don't do that. But in the south of the US, it's very common. You'll hear that a lot. Sir and ma'am. But, anyways, ma'am is the option for talking directly to someone. If you want to say something like senora to someone, you would say ma'am. But honestly, you rock, ma'am, sounds a little weird. It's a little bit overkill. I think in that case, it would be better to just say you rock. That's it. But, anyways, lady is only used for talking about someone. That lady over there, I saw a lady at the gas station. A lady started talking to me in the store. There are also other ways that lady is used, like ladies and gentlemen, or there are other ways that we use lady as well. But in general, lady is used to talk about someone. And it's not a rude thing, it's not an insult like that. It's just a way to refer to a random woman. But we do not use lady to talk to someone directly unless you're indicating that you're being rude. You'll see that if someone is talking to a woman and they are a bit irritated by them or annoyed or they think that they're being ridiculous or something, they might say, Look, lady, listen, lady, blah, blah, blah. Hey, lady, you can't say that to me. Like if they're annoyed with someone, if they're being rude, they might use lady. But if they're being nice or neutral, they're not going to use lady. We don't call people lady directly. It sounds rude. It sounds bad. Why is this the case? I don't know. I don't know why it's like this, but all I know is that ma'am and lady are used differently. They're not the same. We don't have one word like senora, like in Spanish, that you can use in both ways. And this is confusing. I know a lot of people around the world don't understand this. When I was in Cambodia, I was walking around, and a lot of the vendors, a lot of the people who are selling clothes and you know, like stuff for the tourists, they would say like, hello lady, hello lady. This is a clear indication that somebody is not a native speaker of the language because we don't use lady like this. All right, so while I'm filming this video, I can see that I've spent longer than I wanted to on these few topics that I've talked about. So let's just do one more and then we'll wrap it up and I will save the other ones for another video. Hey guys, I'm just coming in here to interrupt the video real quick to tell you that I have a really cool friend in Bogota, Colombia that is an artist. He's very talented, his artwork is very cool. I want you to check it out. Go to his Instagram page. I'm gonna put the link in the comments. You can message him and ask him to make you a piece that he already has on his profile, or you can ask him to make something new that you don't see on his profile. I'm pretty sure he can ship to any country or almost every country. So if you like cool independent artists from Colombia and you want to support, go check out his page. His name is Nicolas. Les puedo decir que es una persona muy chévere. All right, thank you for your attention. Back to the video. So the last thing I want to talk about is not a mistake necessarily. I just want to explain that there's a clear difference here between British and American English. And you can learn and use whatever English you want. I'm not here to tell you what to do, but I personally recommend focusing on North American English unless you have a specific strong connection with England or Ireland or Scotland or Australia. Like, for example, if you're living there or you're planning to move there or you frequently talk to people from there. If not, I recommend just focusing on North American English because we have by far the most native speakers of English. So I saw a comment where a person wrote, I've just discovered your channel. First of all, awesome. Welcome. Welcome to the channel. But what I'm here to talk about today is that I've just discovered your channel sounds very British. In North American English, we are probably gonna say, I just discovered your channel. I just discovered. We're gonna use the simple past. I just discovered your channel. Saying that you have just done something, this is called the present perfect verb tense, this is extremely common in British English. They use it in so many cases where we would just use the simple past. Both are correct and we understand both, but if your goal is to focus on North American English and you want to kind of master that or just really know more about that, then try to use the simple past as much as possible. We love the simple past, we use it all the time. In almost every case, when you're talking about something in the past, you can probably find a way to use the simple past. It's just very common. So yeah, it's not a big deal. I just wanted to bring it to your attention. All right, that's the end of the video. That's all I have time to talk about today. The other comments and mistakes are gonna have to wait for another video. Let me know in the comments if you like these kinds of videos, if you find them to be helpful, or just any questions you have, anything you'd like me to talk about in a future video. I usually read most of the comments. Alright, well, thanks for joining me today, and I'll see you in the next video. Uh bye-bye. Hello, welcome to possibly the best video I've ever made on the channel. I don't know. Maybe I'm being dramatic, but I'm excited. It's a really good one. All right, buckle up, we're going for a ride. By the way, sorry about the noises. Okay, I'm in Guadalajara, Mexico. There's trucks, I'm right near a busy road. Um, there's construction, there's music, ambulances, uh, dogs barking. You know the deal, you know the drill. This video is worth watching, I promise. All right, enough said. Let's get into it. The first thing I want to talk about is something that I see all the time in the comment section of my videos. It's an extremely common mistake and confusion because of other English teachers telling you that you can use get, the word get, instead of understand. I've talked about this briefly before in a video that I made in Spanish, but I really want to talk about this topic more completely this time and in English so that there's no confusion. And also because I got a lot of new students that don't know about this. So here's the truth get and understand are not interchangeable. You cannot just replace understand with get, it only works in very specific contexts. And honestly, it's difficult to explain. So I'm going to generalize and simplify it for you. In general, when we use get in the context of understanding, it's more about understanding the point of what somebody is saying or understanding the point of something. For example, we use it a lot with jokes. Did you get the joke? It's like, did you understand the point of the joke? Did you understand why the joke is funny? Did you get it? No, I didn't get it. I didn't get the joke. When somebody says, I don't get what you're saying, I didn't get what you said, it's that they didn't understand the point. They didn't understand what you are really communicating, what you are saying. But here's the thing, and this is where I see all the mistakes in my comment section. When we talk about understanding a language, like for example, understanding the language that you're speaking, understanding the English that I'm speaking, the words that I'm saying. When we talk about understanding a language, we use understand. And if you use get, a lot of the time it's going to seem very strange and not like a native speaker. So this is the problem. I make videos talking in English, and you guys want to tell me in the comments that you understand my English. You understand me talking. And so I see comments like, I got you completely. Thank you. Native speakers from the US probably wouldn't say that. I got you also has a whole different meaning that we use nowadays, especially in my generation. Nowadays, when somebody my age tells you, I got you, it's like, what kind of music do you like? Oh, I like rock music. Okay, I got you. And I put on rock music. It's like, okay, I'm gonna do what will be good for you. It's a totally different meaning. If we want to say that we understand the language that you're speaking, we would just use understand. We would say, I understood everything you said. I understand your English perfectly. I understand your videos, I understand you when you talk. Here's another comment I saw. I got the class perfectly. That sounds like you bought the class or you obtained the class. That doesn't sound like you understood the class. See, this is the problem. Get has so many meanings. So if you don't use get exactly the way that native speakers use get, it's very ambiguous. It's not so clear what you mean. Obviously, because I'm an English teacher and I understand that there's this confusion, and based on the context, I understand what this person is trying to say. I understand that they're trying to say that they understood the class, they understood my English, but I'm trying to help you actually talk like native speakers so that you avoid confusion with other people and so that you can sound better in English. So in this case, it would be so much better to just say, I understood the class perfectly. I totally understood the class. Here's another example. Someone said that they sometimes use subtitles when the accent is hard to get. That is very strange. Native speakers wouldn't say that. We wouldn't say your accent is hard to get. We would say your accent is hard to understand. It's hard to understand your accent because accent is like part of language, it's a part of speaking a language. For example, if somebody starts speaking Japanese and I don't know Japanese, I'm not gonna say, I don't get you, or I don't get what you're saying, or I didn't get that, because that sounds like it means something else. I would say, sorry, I don't understand you because I don't know Japanese. I don't understand Japanese. Okay, so bottom line, what I want you to take away from this is understand. Understand is a totally normal word to use. There is nothing formal or robotic about the word understand. I use understand all the time. It only has one meaning, basically, so it's very clear what you're trying to say. And it's used when we talk about understanding a language, and it's also used in any context where you want to use understand. The truth is that you don't actually need to use get. You could always use understand in every context, even when we're talking about the point of what you're saying, you know, I don't understand your point. You don't actually have to use get. Yes, native speakers use get to replace understand sometimes, but in very specific contexts, like I mentioned. And it's rarely used when we talk about understanding a language or an accent or pronunciation or anything that has to do with that. Because get is more about understanding the point of what you're saying. So if you want to avoid mistakes, you could always use understand. But if you want to use get, I recommend paying attention to the ways that native speakers use get to replace understand when you consume content in English, when you watch and listen to content in English. See how they use it, and you can copy that. I think the problem is that so many of you have learned this not from content in English, but from videos of English teachers on the internet saying, you'll sound more like a native speaker if you use get instead of understand. That is extremely misleading and it's false a lot of the time. It really depends on the context. All right, enough said. Next topic. So for this video, I just took screenshots of random comments that I saw on my videos where there are common mistakes. So I'm gonna show you what someone said, and you can pause the video and guess what the mistake is, and then I will explain what it is. Alright, the first one. Is amazing, Lau. I like so much this kind of videos. Alright, what are the mistakes here? There are more than one. The first one is starting a sentence with is that's not a question. You're probably only going to start a sentence with is if it's a question. Is it amazing? I don't know. Is it? If you're not asking a question, you're not going to start the sentence with is. You're going to start it with it or it's because you can put it and is together. It's amazing, Lau. You can't have a sentence in English without a subject. You can't say is amazing. Is is the verb, amazing is the adjective. Where's the subject? Where's the thing? It. It's amazing. Thank you very much. But also, it's amazing is very vague. This person just wrote that randomly. I don't know what they're trying to say. I don't know if they're trying to say that the class was amazing, the video is amazing, the topic of the video. I don't know. So it's better to be more specific and write a complete thought, right? Like this video was amazing. This class is amazing. Something like that. The next mistake is I like so much this kind of videos. Well, actually, there's two here. This kind of video. Video. This kind of video. We don't say this kind of videos, we say this kind of video. Even though there are many, but you're just saying this kind of video, this type of video. And the other mistake is I like so much. We don't say I like so much. There are two ways that you're going to express that you really like something. Well, actually, three if you include saying I love. You can always say, I love this kind of video. But if you want to use like, you can say, I really like this kind of video, or you can say, I like this kind of video a lot. I like this kind of video a lot. Personally, I think the best one is I really like this kind of video. Super natural, super comfortable, super common native speaker. I really like this kind of video. We use this form to express this all the time. I really like this. I really like it. I'm glad you like this kind of video. All right, the next one. Have you ever been in Colombia? Very common mistake. And I think there's confusion because been is from the verb to be. And so people are thinking about being in a place. And that's logical. But unfortunately, English is very strange here. And when we say have you been, we're not really talking about being in a place. We're talking about having gone to a place. We're really saying, did you go to this place? It's about going to a place, not being in a place. I know that we are not using the verb go or gone, but that's the way we think about it. That's the way that we use it. That's the way that we mean it. We're gonna say, have you been to Colombia? You can think of have you been as just like have you gone, have you gone to? It's the same thing, the same meaning, even though it's the verb to be and not the verb to go. So have you ever been to Colombia? Yes, I have been to Colombia. I went to Medellin for about three months last year, and actually it's funny that you're asking me because I am going back to Colombia in two days, but this time I am going to Bogotá, and I'm very excited because I've never been to Bogota, but I spent some time in the Andes when I lived in Ecuador. You know, I went to the capital of Ecuador, I went to Quito, I went to many cities in the Andes of Ecuador. So I'm familiar with this kind of place, but I've never been to the Andes in Colombia, and I'm excited to go back to Colombia in general. So to answer your question, yes, I've been to Colombia and I'm going back. All right, the next thing I want to talk about is not necessarily a mistake. It's like a personal preference, but it's my recommendation as a 27-year-old native speaker from the United States who understands the culture and the way that we use English and the way that we have used English over the years. I see a lot of comments with people trying to make words shorter, like instead of saying you, they just write the letter you, or instead of writing and, they just write the letter N. And I also always see people instead of writing thank you or thanks, they try to make that shorter, like T H X or something like that. I understand why people are doing this. I understand that they think that this is the way that native speakers use the language and it seems more like a native speaker, more natural, more advanced, whatever. Or it's cool, it's like internet text language. I don't know. But honestly, this is how we texted when it was 2007 and we had those phones that you had to text like this, you know, the flip-up phones, and we were just discovering texting for the first time. And I mean, I was a kid, and it was harder to text then. So we, you know, we created all these like short ways of texting. But nowadays we have the full keyboard with all the letters, and texting isn't really like a new thing anymore. And I think that we have matured a bit. And so I currently don't know any native speakers who actually text like that. These things we've kind of stopped doing over the years. We don't do this anymore. And honestly, not only does it look like you're stuck in 2007, but it kind of looks childish. Of course, there are always gonna be people that do it. Of course, there are native speakers that do it. And sometimes we do it to be like funny or cute, like kind of like a throwback, like vintage, you know, like this is how we used to do it. But in general, just texting, writing normally, we don't use this stuff very often. What you are gonna see all the time, what native speakers do use all the time, are the abbreviations for entire phrases. Like instead of by the way, we write BTW, or instead of to be honest, we write T B H. We love to abbreviate entire phrases, but it's not so common to shorten individual words unless that word is like really long or annoying. Like, for example, sometimes instead of though, I will write just T-H-O, like though, like a short version, because the rest of the word is not even pronounced. It's like irrelevant. So yeah, we do that for certain words that are like long and ridiculous, but in general, we usually just abbreviate entire phrases. I write LOL all the time, which stands for laugh out loud. It's just my way of saying, like, ha ha. There are many common abbreviations, but they're usually for entire phrases, not just one three-letter word shortened to one letter, like you becoming you. That's like unnecessary. It's like you're you're doing too much, like you're trying to be too much in the text slang. It's like just write normally. So, once again, it's not a big deal if you write that way. We all understand it. It's not necessarily a mistake if you're just like texting, you know, it's okay, but if you want to seem more like an adult or more mature in English and more normal, um, I would just write you and and and stuff like that normally. Just write thank you. So that's just my advice because I see that a lot in my comments too. You know, I'm always keeping it real with you guys. I miss making these videos talking about real English, talking about common mistakes. I'm always trying to give you my perspective as a native speaker who uses the language in real life situations and tells you how it really is. And I think that's about it. All right. So I'll see you in the next video. A bye bye. When I say it like that, that comes from when native speakers talk on the phone in the States, like, yeah, yeah, mm, bye bye. It comes from that, like this, like mm, bye bye. Not like bye-bye, but like bye bye, bye bye. All right, a bye-bye.