12 common mistakes in Spanish, with explanations

This Romance language lends itself to many errors, due to its complexity.

Spanish is a language that is quite extensive and rich in terms of its expressions. It is partly for this reason that people often make certain mistakes when using Spanish.

In this article we are going to see what are some of the most frequent mistakes in SpanishThe most common mistakes in Spanish, which usually occur in everyday life, can sometimes go unnoticed by anyone.

What is the Spanish language like?

Spanish is a language derived from Latin, and is therefore a Romance language. It comes exactly from Castile, a region belonging to the Iberian Peninsula. The regions where Spanish is spoken as a native language are Spain, Latin America, and Equatorial Guinea.

Before looking at the most frequent errors in Spanish, it is necessary to know that the term Castilian is used as a synonym for "Spanish" and "Spanish language", especially to distinguish it from the other languages spoken in other areas of the Spanish territory.

The most frequent errors in Spanish

In the following lines we will see a selection of the most common errors in the Spanish language.

1. Omission error

This error is quite common nowadays, and it has even has even become normalized by a large number of people using the Internet to communicate via chat, or through the to communicate via chat, or through text messages via a telephone company.

The error consists of the voluntary or involuntary omission of letters, words, or even the omission of complete articles or prepositions, perhaps with the intention of simplifying a text or adapting to a socially accepted but incorrect form of communication.

2. Generalization error

In this error, which is also quite common in the Spanish language, what happens is that the subject applies the same rules for all things, in a global mannerwithout stopping to discriminate in the details. For example, "I don't like to go out at night anywhere".

3. Gender agreement error

In these cases, what happens is that what precedes the word does not agree with its gender.. This is one of the most frequent and least detected errors in Spanish among those we will see in this list.

For example, you could say -el agua está frío" instead of the correct thing to say, which would be "el agua está fría", but some people will not notice the difference. Among other cases, such as "la pijama" instead of saying "el pijama".

4. Temporal concordance error

When the error is a temporal concordance error, what happens is that the person interweaves several verb tenses together in the same sentence..

Let's see some examples of this situation: "Yesterday I went to the supermarket and I didn't see any milk".

5. Substitution error

What happens in this case is that the speaker exchanges a word for another word that resembles it and gives it the same meaning, even though this is totally wrong. even though this is totally erroneous, in any context. For example, it is common to exchange "aptitudes" for "attitudes", although both mean different things.

6. Mistakes in colloquial expressions and terms

These errors occur when a colloquial phrase is modified, substituting some of the words that compose it. Colloquial phrases do not admit changessince their meaning is not literal.

This happens, for example, with the phrase "no se cala de nada", when the word cala is replaced by empala, although both words are synonyms, it is not correct to substitute it in the sentence.

7. Noun error

This type of error occurs when reference is made to a collective that is in the plural or singular and then the verb is changed. What is accepted is that when a reference is made in singular or plural, the verb is kept the same way, the verb is kept in the same way in singular or plural..

Clear examples of this error would be the following, "los empleados de esta tienda es muy agradable" "las personas de este empleo es muy amigable", among other similar cases that tend to occur frequently in Spanish.

8. Linguistic interference error

This is the phenomenon that occurs when we interpret the sound of a language foreign to us as a sound of our mother tongue and we give it the same meaning. and give it the same meaning.

This happens a lot with the lyrics of songs in English, a good example is the song "sweet dreams" by British lavender Eurythmics, which says in the chorus "Sweet dreams are made of this" (sweet dreams are made of this), and in Spanish that sound could be understood as "Blue jeans at noon".

9. Errors in the use of capital letters

In Spanish, people often write the initial letter of the days of the week or the months of the year with a capital letter, regardless of where the word is located in the text.

Doing so is a mistake, the correct way is to write them in lower case lettersunless they are after a period or at the beginning of a text. In spite of the normalization that this custom is receiving, it is still incorrect, just like those previously mentioned.

10. Change of b for v and vice versa

In Spanish, the pronunciation of v and b have become almost indistinguishable, so it is a very common mistake to exchange both letters with each other. For example, using "valón" when you mean "balón".

11. Word joining error

This type of error in Spanish occurs when two words that should be independent of each other are joined as if they were part of one. as if they were part of one. For example, it happens with "over all", turning it into "over all" or with "because" when it should be "why".

12. Syllable separation error

This error, so frequent in Spanish, is the B side of the previous one. In this case, two syllables of a word are separated, giving rise to two words. It occurs when writing "por qué" instead of "porqué" or, for example, "si no" instead of "sino".