The A2 Mistakes That Survive Into B1, and How to Stop Them
Somewhere around A2 your English starts working. People understand you, conversations go somewhere, and the pressure that made you check every sentence disappears. That is the moment a handful of small errors stop being corrected and start being permanent. These five are the ones that travel furthest.
There is a particular kind of error that only appears once your English is working. At A1 mistakes are large and they block meaning, so someone fixes them for you. By A2 the sentence gets through, the other person answers the question you actually asked, and nobody stops to mention that you said the wrong word. The error gets one more repetition instead of a correction.
That is how these five survive. None of them is difficult and none of them takes long to understand. What they need is to be met again a few times after you understand them, which is a different job from learning them in the first place. The ladder continues in the guide to the mistakes that separate B1 from B2.
The five at a glance
If you read one section, read this one. Each row is the error, what learners tend to say, the version to say instead, and the rule in a single line.
| Mistake | Often said | Say instead | The rule in a line |
|---|---|---|---|
| -ed and -ing adjectives | I am boring in this class | I am bored in this class | -ing describes the thing, -ed describes the person. |
| Uncountable nouns | He gave me an advice | He gave me some advice | Advice, information, news and furniture have no plural. |
| Verb patterns | I enjoy to read | I enjoy reading | The first verb decides whether the second is -ing or to. |
| Second conditional | If I would have time, I would call | If I had time, I would call | The if half takes the past, not would. |
| Dependent prepositions | She is good in maths | She is good at maths | The preposition belongs to the word. Learn them together. |
1. I am boring, and other things you did not mean
English builds two adjectives from the same verb, and they point in opposite directions. The -ing form describes whatever causes the feeling: a boring film, an interesting book, a tiring day. The -ed form describes the person who has the feeling: I am bored, she is interested, we were tired.
So "I am boring in this class" is a complete sentence that says something you almost certainly do not mean. It says you are the thing making the class dull. The version you wanted is "I am bored in this class".
The pairs worth having ready are bored and boring, interested and interesting, tired and tiring, confused and confusing, surprised and surprising, excited and exciting. A quick way to check yourself while speaking: if the word is describing you, it almost always ends in -ed.
2. The nouns that refuse to be counted
A small group of very common English nouns cannot be counted, which means they take no article a or an and no plural s. Advice, information, news, furniture, luggage, homework, research and progress are the ones that catch learners most often, partly because the equivalent word in many other languages is perfectly countable.
You do not say an advice or two advices. You say some advice, or a piece of advice when you want to count one of them. The same shape works across the group: a piece of information, an item of furniture, a bit of news.
News deserves its own line, because it ends in s and is still singular. "The news is bad" is correct, and "the news are bad" is not. Nothing about the spelling tells you that, which is why it is worth storing as a sentence rather than as a rule.
3. Enjoy reading, decide to read, and the list you cannot derive
When one verb follows another, the first verb decides the shape of the second, and the decision has nothing to do with meaning. Enjoy takes -ing. Decide takes to. Both describe a choice about an activity, and they behave differently anyway.
This is the single most common source of small errors at this level, and there is no shortcut. Enjoy, finish, avoid, mind, suggest, practise and keep all take -ing. Decide, want, hope, plan, promise, learn and afford all take a to-infinitive. A few, like start and continue, accept either with no change in meaning.
Because there is no logic underneath, learn each one inside a sentence you would actually say. "I enjoy reading before bed" is retrievable when you are speaking. "Enjoy plus gerund" is not, and the version you can produce under pressure is the one that counts. That difference is what passive and active vocabulary means in practice.
4. If I would, and where would actually goes
The second conditional talks about something unreal or unlikely: if this were true, that would follow. The form puts the past simple in the if half and would in the other half. If I had more time, I would learn the piano. If she knew the answer, she would tell you.
The error is putting would in both halves, because that is what the meaning seems to ask for. It does not: would appears exactly once, and it appears in the result, never after if.
One extra piece worth knowing early. With the verb to be, the second conditional traditionally uses were for every subject: if I were you, if he were here. "If I was you" is extremely common in speech and nobody will misunderstand it, but were is what you want in writing and in an exam.
5. Good at, interested in, depend on
Some words in English arrive permanently attached to a preposition, and the pairing is fixed. You are good at something, interested in something, afraid of something, and something depends on something else. Change the preposition and the sentence stops sounding like English, even though the meaning survives.
There is no rule to work these out from, because the preposition is part of the word rather than a separate choice. Translating from your own language is what produces "good in maths" and "depends of the weather", and it will keep producing them until each pair is learned as one unit.
- good at, bad at, brilliant at something
- interested in, involved in, successful in something
- afraid of, proud of, tired of, full of something
- depend on, rely on, concentrate on, insist on something
- listen to, belong to, look forward to something
How to fix an error that nobody corrects
Understanding any of the five above takes about two minutes, and understanding is not the part that fails. What fails is that nothing in an ordinary day punishes the wrong version. Nobody misunderstands "I enjoy to read", so no correction arrives, and the pattern gets another repetition. That is the same trap described in the guide to remembering grammar rules.
What works is small and slightly unglamorous. Write the corrected sentence rather than the rule, keep the wrong version beside it for the first few reviews, and meet the pair again a handful of times across the following weeks rather than once tonight.
- Store "I enjoy reading before bed", not "enjoy takes -ing". The sentence is what comes out of your mouth.
- Keep your own wrong version next to it at first. The contrast is most of what your memory is storing.
- Say it out loud once when you write it down. Producing it once makes producing it later far easier.
- Space the reviews out. An error that took a year to set does not come apart in one evening.
Where MindDory fits
Everything on this page is a small number of items that have to survive weeks rather than an evening, which is the exact problem MindDory is built for. You save the corrected sentence with the context you met it in, and review sessions are assembled from whatever is closest to slipping rather than from whatever you added most recently. It is the same machinery that carries vocabulary you meet while reading, pointed at a grammar correction instead.
If you want to check where you actually stand before deciding what to study, the free A2 English vocabulary list is a more useful diagnostic than a quiz: the words you recognise but could not produce are the work.
None of these five will stop anyone understanding you. That is exactly why they are still there.