Some Mistakes That Native Speaker’s Make

I’m a native speaker of Spanish. I have 30 years of experience speaking Spanish. Well, less than 30 years because obviously I couldn’t speak when I was a baby. As I am a native speaker of Spanish, I never make a single mistake, I’m never wrong, I know all about Spanish. I’m practically a Spanish encyclopedia. No, no, no, look. It’s not like that. Being a native Spanish speaker doesn’t mean that you speak perfect Spanish and without any grammatical errors. 

Today I’m going to tell you what the most common errors of Spanish speakers are. If you’re interested, keep watching. I’m gonna tell you a story: a few days ago I posted a story on Instagram. I wrote, “It’s not necessary to shout at students.” After posting it I started to wonder, is that right? “gritarle a los estudiantes?” or is it “gritarles a los estudiantes”? I was so unsure of what I’d written that I had to call two people who are also native speakers. 

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Those two people told me that how I’d written it was right. “No es necesario gritarle a los estudiantes.” Alright, alright… but the truth was that I had a hunch. Something wasn’t right, but I wasn’t sure. So I decided to look it up. I had to know if it was true. Finally, I found the answer: it wasn’t ‘gritarle’, it was ‘gritarles a los estudiantes’. But how?! My whole life I’d been tricked… full of lies! And that wasn’t all, I also found out that this was an extremely common mistake in both Spain and Latin America, and it’s also the most common grammatical error in Colombia too. 

So that’s the first most common error of native Spanish speakers: The use of le, lo and la. Lots of Spanish speakers use lo, la and le incorrectly. For example, they use le when they should use lo and la or they use lo and la when they should be using le. Let’s do something. I’m going to show you 2 options and you have to choose the one you think is right. If you, my Spanish students, don’t get it right, don’t feel too bad about it because many Spanish speakers also do it and they don’t realise it. Choose the right answer. 

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‘Yesterday I called Anna” The correct answer is ‘Ayer la llamé’ ‘Anna’ is the direct object. She’s the person that directly receives the action and therefore it’s correct to say ‘La llamé’. Let’s have a look at this next one. ‘It’s important to talk to your kids’ This example is similar to the sentence I wrote on Instagram. The correct answer is ‘hablarles a tus hijos’, using le or les depending on the number of people. It’s not just you, the truth is that this is a pretty hard topic. 

Mistakes occur sometimes because of education level, region, or simply because it’s something that is heard often and so we also end up using it like so. Common error number 2. Choose the right answer. ‘There were a lot of people’ The correct answer is ‘Había muchas personas’ And this one, ‘There were a lot of parties’ The correct answer is ‘hubo much as fiestas’ This is the famous verb haber and when we’re talking about existence, we always use the verb in the singular. 

There were 30 kids, there were too many offers, there are few people… Common error number 3. ‘What did you say?’ The correct question is ‘¿Qué dijiste? The common error in this case is the conjugation of this verb. For some reason, there are people that say ‘hicistes’, ‘comistes’, ‘dormistes’… etc. but this is not correct. the correct thing is saying “hiciste”, “dormiste”, “comiste” Common mistake number four This common mistake is the instruction for the person “ustedes” There are people who add an N at the end of the verb. 

But it’s not right.It’s better to say siéntense, escúchenme… espérenme, prepárense Common mistake number 5 “i think it’s a beautiful place”  This happens often as well There are verbs that need a preposition preposition “de”. and there are other verbs that don’t need it. There’s a trick I have when I am not sure what to use: I ask the question.Like “estoy segura”. The question would be:” De qué estoy segura?” So, the answer is”Estoy segura de que va a llover” The thing is:Don’t be so hard on yourself when you speak Spanish. 

It’s very likely you’ll make a mistake at least once. However, that shouldn’t stop you from using what you know It’s true. There are lots of people who will criticize you, they won’t always mean well what matters is to keep that mistake in mind and learn so you can correct it and next time you can speak better.Before finishing this video I want to thank our subscribers for helping us subtitle these videos.