12 Common Grammar Mistakes Spanish Speakers Make in English

September 7, 2026 · 10 min read · Breakers Academy

There is a specific kind of English mistake that has nothing to do with your level. You can run a team, close deals, read contracts, and still say "I have 34 years" — because in Spanish that sentence is not just correct, it is the only way to say it.

That is what almost every item on this list has in common. These are not gaps in your knowledge. They are correct Spanish sentences wearing English words, and they survive for years precisely because nobody corrects them: your listener understands you perfectly and moves on.

1. "I have 30 years" → "I'm 30 years old"

English uses be where Spanish uses tener for states of the body and of age. Spanish says tengo 30 años; English says I am 30 years old.

The same swap applies to a whole family of expressions, and getting the pattern once fixes all of them:

The one that stays with have: "I have a headache", "I have a cold" (the illness). "I'm cold" is temperature, "I have a cold" is a virus.

2. "I'm agree" → "I agree"

Agree is a complete verb in English. It never takes a form of be in front of it.

• "I agree." / "I don't agree." / "I completely agree with you."
• "We agreed on a deadline."
• Never: I'm agree, I'm not agree, I was agree.

This is one of the very few mistakes on this list that fluent listeners genuinely notice, because it appears in the middle of otherwise advanced sentences. It is also one of the fastest to fix — there are only three or four forms to relearn.

3. "I live here since 2019" → "I've lived here since 2019"

When something started in the past and is still true, English requires the present perfect: have + past participle. Spanish uses the simple present for the same idea, which is why this error is nearly universal.

• "I have lived in Florida since 2019."
• "She has worked here for six years."
• "How long have you been in the US?"

since = the starting point (since 2019, since March, since I moved). for = the length (for six years, for two months, for a long time).

4. "The people is very nice" → "People are very nice"

People is plural in English, so it takes are, were, and have. Spanish la gente is singular, and the article comes along with it.

Three nouns cause most of the trouble:

• people → always plural: "People are waiting outside."
• police → always plural: "The police are on the way."
• information, advice, furniture, equipment → never plural, never an: "I need some information", not an information; "Can you give me some advice?", not an advice.

If you need a single unit of those last ones: a piece of information, a piece of advice.

5. "Is very important" → "It's very important"

English sentences need a subject, even when there is nothing real to talk about. Spanish drops it freely; English cannot.

• "It's raining." (not Is raining)
• "It's important to arrive early."
• "It's 8 o'clock."

The partner mistake is using have for hay. Spanish hay mucha gente becomes "There are a lot of people", never it has a lot of people. Rule of thumb: there is / there are = something exists; it is = describing a thing, the weather, the time, or a situation.

6. "Do you know where is the bathroom?" → "Do you know where the bathroom is?"

Once a question is inside another sentence, the word order goes back to normal statement order: subject, then verb.

This is worth real attention, because the embedded version is the polite one. "Where is the manager?" is fine but blunt; "Could you tell me where the manager is?" is what you actually want in a store, an office, or a school.

7. "He work here" → "He works here"

In the present simple, English marks only one person — he, she, it — with a single -s (be is the exception: am / are / is), and that ending is easy to lose in fast speech.

• "She has two kids." / "He doesn't want to." / "It costs forty dollars."
• And once does or doesn't appears, the -s moves onto it: "Does he work here?", not does he works.

Spanish speakers do not drop this ending out of habit from their own language — Spanish conjugates everything. It disappears because English inflection is unstressed and almost inaudible. This is a monitoring problem, not a knowledge one, which is why it takes longer to fix than it should.

8. "Explain me the problem" → "Explain the problem to me"

Some English verbs cannot put the listener directly after them. Explain, say, describe, suggest, and recommend all need to in front of the person you are talking to.

• "Can you explain it to me?" — not explain me it
• "He said to me that…" — or more naturally, "He told me that…"
• "She described the apartment to us."

The clean shortcut: tell takes a person, say and explain do not. Tell me, tell him, tell your boss — but say something to me, explain something to me. The full pattern, including reported speech, is in say vs. tell.

9. "Make a question" → "Ask a question"

Spanish hacer splits into do, make, and several other verbs in English. The tendency — do for the activity, make for the result — covers a lot of it, but not every case, and hacer una pregunta lands outside both. About fifteen collocations carry most of daily life.

Learn these as fixed blocks. Where the tendency and the collocation disagree, the collocation wins.

10. "The life is difficult" → "Life is difficult"

English drops the in front of general, abstract, and plural ideas where Spanish keeps it.

• "Life is difficult." / "Money isn't everything." / "I like dogs."
• But keep the when it is specific: "The dogs next door bark all night."

The mirror-image mistake is missing a in front of jobs. Spanish says es abogada; English says "She's a lawyer". Every singular countable noun needs an article or a possessive in front of it — a, the, my, this. Outside a short list of fixed phrases (by car, at school, in bed), there is no bare version.

11. "I'm interested in to learn" → "I'm interested in learning"

After a preposition, English uses the -ing form, never the infinitive.

• "I'm interested in learning Spanish."
• "Thank you for coming."
• "She's good at negotiating."
• "Before leaving, check the address."
• "I look forward to hearing from you." — the classic trap, because to here is a preposition, not an infinitive.

12. False friends that change your meaning

These are the mistakes worth fixing first, because they do not sound like errors — they sound like a different sentence, and your listener acts on the wrong information.

The two that cause the most trouble in professional settings are actually and assist. "Actually, the report is finished" tells your manager you are correcting them. "I will assist the meeting" tells them you plan to help run it, not attend it.

Which of these should you actually fix first?

Fix the mistakes that change meaning before the ones that only change form. Ranked by real-world cost:

1. False friends (#12) — highest cost. They transmit wrong information and nobody realizes there was an error.
2. Verb patterns, collocations, and prepositions (#8, #9, #11) — moderate cost. They force the listener to re-parse the sentence.
3. Present perfect (#3) and embedded questions (#6) — moderate cost, high visibility. Both appear constantly in interviews, calls, and small talk, so they shape the impression you make.
4. "I'm agree" (#2), "I have 30 years" (#1), "the people is" (#4), and the missing it (#5) — low comprehension cost, but very audible. Cheap to fix, so fix them.
5. Third-person -s (#7) and articles (#10) — lowest cost. These almost never cause a misunderstanding. They are the last thing to disappear even for people who have lived in the US for twenty years, and they are not what is holding your English back.

That ranking matters more than the list itself. Adults tend to attack whichever error feels most embarrassing, which is usually one from group 5, and then spend months monitoring an ending that no listener notices.

Why knowing the rule doesn't stop the mistake

You almost certainly knew several of these rules before you opened this page, and you will still say "I'm agree" tomorrow. That is normal and it is not a memory failure.

Grammar you have only studied lives in the slow, deliberate part of your attention. In real conversation there is no room for it — you are choosing words, listening, managing your face, and thinking about what you actually want. The correction only becomes reliable when it is attached to a phrase you say out loud repeatedly, not to a rule you can recite.

Practically, that means: pick one mistake. Write three sentences you genuinely use in a normal week — "I've worked at this company for four years", "I completely agree", "Could you tell me where the meeting is?" — and say those three out loud until they arrive without effort. Then take the next mistake. One a week is a realistic pace; twelve at once is not.

This is the whole logic behind our scenario-based method: grammar gets corrected inside the situation where you will need it — a phone call, an intake form, an introduction — rather than in an exercise, because that is the only place the correction survives. Everyday situations like these are the core of Real-Life English.

One last thing

Nobody has ever lost a client over a missing -s. What people lose is the sentence they gave up on halfway, or the question they didn't ask because they weren't sure how to build it. Fix the twelve above in order of what they actually cost you, and let the rest fall away with time and use — which, for adults living in English, it eventually does.