5 Common English Grammar Mistakes by Vietnamese Speakers

Posting by popular request: Aside from the typical misuse of articles (Ø, a/an, the), modal verbs, and tense/aspect, here are some (syntactic/morphological) English mistakes by native Vietnamese speakers that I keep hearing living here in Vietnam.

Notation
A quick note on notation for linguistic acceptability first since I might use it in future posts. No time to get into a detailed treatment of acceptability judgments here but in case you were interested, there’s plenty of literature on it . Anyway, here’s how we’ll denote acceptability:

*indicates that the is unacceptable in most contexts.
?? indicates that the utterance / sentence is awkward and unacceptable by some native speakers.
? indicates that the utterance / sentence may not be unacceptable but is awkward.
(null) No marker indicates the utterance is acceptable in most contexts.

5 Common Mistakes
For the examples below and in future posts, we are using acceptability judgments by native English speakers (), though these examples likely apply to most . Not listed in any particular order:

#1 Talent
Talent is not a person or an animate noun for that matter.

*Vietnam has a lot of technical talents. (assuming the meaning is that there are a lot of talented people; odd to say a country is talented)
Vietnam has a lot of technical talent.
Vietnam has a lot of talented technical people.

#2 Technical
Technical is an adjective not a noun.

*The team is very good at technical.
*We just focus on the technical.
?The team is very good at technical matters.
The team is very good in dealing with technical matters.
The team is very technically adept.

#3 To date
This verb is just a simple transitive verb and does not select a preposition in the object position.

*Tuan dates/is dating with Thao.
?Tuan dates Thao.
Tuan is dating Thao.

#4 To discuss
Discuss is similar to the above.

?We discuss machine learning.
*We discuss about machine learning.
*We are discussing about machine learning.
We are discussing machine learning.

#5 To have
The possessive verb “to have” generally does not take progressive aspect (“-ing”).

??Thao is having a boyfriend. (Sounds like she’s giving birth to a boyfriend)
*Thao has/had boyfriend.
Thao has a boyfriend.