Cindy is a language-loving American writer for the Engram blog. Her love for languages, including her first language English, is what drives her when she writes and translates for a living.
International learners of English may have trouble at first noticing errors in parallelism that they make, but much like subject-verb agreement, parallelism is a relatively consistent rule that is easy to execute.
Fewer is used for quantities that can be counted with finite numbers (whole numbers like 1, 2, 3). Meanwhile, less is used with uncountable nouns and continuous amounts.
Run-on sentences are common within the writing of people whose first language is not English and in casual sentences of native speakers of the language. A run-on is a sentence with multiple independent clauses or sentences that are not joined or separated properly
Writers whose first language is not English tend to omit commas in places that need commas. This is the most common type of punctuation errors among non-native English speakers.
The subject-verb agreement rule requires a noun to match the plurality of the verb that goes with it. Even native English speakers get wrong time to time, especially if the subject and the verb are not right next to each other.
Idiomatic phrases are learned through experience and exposure to the English language, so it’s difficult for non-native speakers of English to know these phrases right off the bat.
