Common English Grammar Mistakes Indian Students Make (and How to Fix Them)

Say this sentence out loud: "Myself Priya, I am from Chennai, and since five years I am learning English." If you grew up in India, that sentence probably sounds completely normal. It might even sound polite and confident. But in a Canadian classroom, a job interview, or an IELTS speaking test, it flags three separate grammar issues in the space of fifteen words — and none of them are things you'd ever notice if everyone around you talks the same way.

That's really the core of this problem. These aren't mistakes in the sense of not knowing English — most Indian students who make them are fluent, articulate, and have been speaking English since childhood. They're mistakes that survive because they're common within India, reinforced across regional languages, schools, and everyday conversation, so nobody ever corrects them. They only become visible once you're being scored by an IELTS examiner, emailing a professor in Toronto, or sitting across from a hiring manager in Mississauga who's never heard the phrase "prepone" in his life.

This piece walks through the mistakes that show up again and again — in speaking tests, in essays, and in everyday campus conversation — and, more usefully, what to actually do about each one.

"Myself Rahul" and Other Self-Introduction Habits

Let's start with the big one, because it's almost a rite of passage. "Myself Rahul, working in software" is a direct translation pattern that's extremely common in Indian English but grammatically doesn't work the way it's being used. "Myself" is a reflexive pronoun — it refers back to a subject that's already been mentioned, as in "I did it myself" or "I taught myself Python." It isn't a substitute for "I am."

The correct versions are simple:

• "I am Rahul."
• "My name is Rahul."
• "Let me introduce myself — I'm Rahul." (This one does use "myself" correctly, because it follows a proper subject-verb structure.)

Why does this matter so much? Because self-introductions happen in exactly the high-stakes moments where first impressions count most — IELTS speaking Part 1, job interviews, the first seminar of a new semester when your professor asks everyone to introduce themselves. Getting it wrong doesn't ruin anything, but it's often the very first sentence someone hears from you, and it's an easy fix that instantly makes you sound more polished.

Articles: The Small Words That Cause Big Problems

Hindi, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, and most Indian languages don't have articles — no direct equivalent of "a," "an," or "the." English leans on them constantly, which means this is often the single hardest habit to fix, because your brain genuinely doesn't register that a word is missing.

A few patterns show up over and over:

Dropping articles entirely:

• Wrong: "I am going to market to buy vegetable."
• Right: "I am going to the market to buy vegetables."

Using "the" where it isn't needed, especially with general or abstract nouns:

• Wrong: "The education is important for the success."
• Right: "Education is important for success."

Missing "a/an" before singular countable nouns:

• Wrong: "She is doctor and he is engineer."
• Right: "She is a doctor and he is an engineer."

The rule of thumb that helps most: articles attach to countable nouns when you're talking about one specific or one general example of something ("a book," "the book I bought yesterday"), but abstract or general concepts — education, honesty, love, poverty — usually go bare. It's not a rule you'll internalize by memorizing it; it's a rule you'll internalize by reading a lot of edited English (newspapers, novels, well-written websites) and noticing, almost passively, where articles land. More on that in the practice section below.

Tense Consistency: Picking a Lane and Staying In It

This is the mistake that shows up most in spoken English, especially when you're talking fast or telling a story. "Yesterday I go to the market and bought vegetables" mixes present tense ("go") with past tense ("bought") in the same sentence describing the same past event.

It happens because in the moment of speaking, you're translating a thought faster than you're tracking verb tense, and Hindi's verb structure doesn't map onto English tenses in a one-to-one way — a single Hindi tense form can correspond to two or three different English tenses depending on context. The fix in speaking tests specifically: before you answer a question like "Tell me about a memorable trip," decide the tense in your head first. If it happened in the past, commit to past tense for the whole answer — went, saw, ate, felt, was — and don't let a stray present-tense verb slip in halfway through.

In writing, this is even easier to catch, because you can reread. A useful trick: finish your paragraph, then go back and underline every verb. If you're narrating a single past event, every underlined verb should be in a past form unless there's a clear reason (a general truth, a quote, a comparison to the present) for it not to be.

"Since Five Years" vs. "For Five Years"

This one is almost mechanical once you see the rule, but it's persistent because "since" and "for" both translate to similar constructions in Hindi and other Indian languages.

• Since marks a starting point in time: since 2019, since January, since I arrived in Canada.
• For marks a duration or length of time: for five years, for two months, for a long time.

So "I have been learning English since five years" is wrong — "five years" isn't a starting point, it's a duration, so it needs "for." The correct version is "I have been learning English for five years," or, if you want to name the starting point instead, "I have been learning English since 2019."

A quick test that works almost every time: if the answer to "since when?" is a number of years/months/days, you need "for." If the answer is a specific date, year, or event, you need "since."

Subject-Verb Agreement in Longer Sentences

Short sentences rarely trip anyone up — "he is," "they are," nobody messes that up. The trouble starts when a sentence gets longer and a plural noun sneaks in between the real subject and its verb.

• Wrong: "One of my friends are coming to the airport."
• Right: "One of my friends is coming to the airport."

The real subject here is "one," which is singular — "of my friends" is just a phrase describing which one, and it shouldn't change the verb. The mistake happens because "friends," the noun sitting right next to the verb, is plural, and our ear naturally matches the verb to the nearest noun rather than the actual subject.

This shows up constantly in IELTS and academic writing with phrases like:

• "The list of items are on the table" → should be "is," because "list" is the subject.
• "Each of the students have submitted their assignment" → should be "has," because "each" is singular.
• "The number of applicants have increased" → should be "has" (note: "a number of applicants have increased" would actually be correct, since "a number of" functions differently — this distinction alone is worth a full grammar lesson, but the safe habit is to always identify the true subject first).

The fix here isn't memorization, it's a habit: when you write a long sentence, physically (or mentally) cross out every prepositional phrase — "of my friends," "of the students," "of applicants" — and check whether what's left agrees with your verb.

"Prepone," "Revert Back," and Other Indian-English Constructions

These aren't grammar mistakes exactly — they're vocabulary and phrasing choices that are completely standard within India but unfamiliar or redundant outside it. Worth knowing because they show up constantly in emails and professional conversation once you're in Canada.

• "Prepone" (to move something earlier) isn't standard English outside South Asia. In Canada, you'd say "move up," "move earlier," or "bring forward" — as in "Can we move the meeting up to 2 PM?"
• "Revert back" is redundant — "revert" already means "to go back," so "revert back to you" is saying "back" twice. Just say "I'll revert to you shortly" or, more naturally in Canadian professional English, "I'll get back to you shortly."
• "Do the needful" is polite and common in Indian professional correspondence but reads as old-fashioned or overly formal in a Canadian workplace. "Please let me know if you need anything else" or "Please proceed with this" lands better.
• "Kindly revert" → "Please let me know" or "Please get back to me" is the more natural equivalent.
• "Out of station" (meaning out of town) isn't understood outside India at all. Use "out of town" or "away."

None of these will get flagged as "wrong" on an IELTS test necessarily, since the test is scored on grammatical accuracy and coherence, not regional vocabulary. But if you're emailing a professor, a co-op employer, or a landlord in Canada, these phrases can make your writing feel slightly out of step with the audience, even when every sentence is technically correct.

Prepositions: The Quiet Troublemakers

Preposition mistakes rarely change meaning but they're one of the fastest ways a sentence reads as slightly "off" to a native speaker's ear, because prepositions don't translate logically between languages at all.

Common swaps:

• "Discuss about" → just "discuss" (discuss is already transitive: "Let's discuss the plan," not "discuss about the plan")
• "Married with" → "married to"
• "Good in maths" → "good at maths"
• "Depend of" → "depend on"
• "Pay attention on" → "pay attention to"

There isn't a shortcut for prepositions — they genuinely have to be learned phrase by phrase, through exposure, because the logic behind them is inconsistent even to native speakers. This is one area where reading matters more than studying rules.

Why This Actually Costs You Marks on IELTS and PTE

It's worth being blunt about this, because a lot of students underestimate it: on the IELTS Writing and Speaking bands, "Grammatical Range and Accuracy" is one of four criteria, each worth 25% of your score. A band 8 or 9 requires a wide range of structures used with full flexibility and only occasional, non-systematic errors. If you're mixing tenses in every paragraph, dropping articles repeatedly, or making subject-verb agreement errors as a pattern rather than a one-off slip, that's not "occasional" — it's systematic, and it will typically cap your grammar score around a 6, regardless of how strong your vocabulary or ideas are.

This is genuinely one of the more frustrating parts of IELTS prep, because a student can have excellent arguments, rich vocabulary, and a well-organized essay, and still land a 6.5 overall because the same three or four grammar habits repeat across every paragraph. The good news is that this also means grammar fixes are some of the highest-leverage prep you can do — unlike vocabulary, which takes long-term reading habits to build, a habit like tense consistency or subject-verb agreement can genuinely improve within a few focused weeks if you practice it deliberately rather than just reading about it.

PTE, which scores partly through automated speech and writing recognition, is arguably even less forgiving of tense-mixing and article errors, since the algorithm is pattern-matching against expected structures more rigidly than a human examiner interpreting your meaning.

Beyond the Test: Classroom and Workplace English in Canada

If you're already in Canada, or about to be, there's a second layer to this that most grammar guides skip entirely — the gap between "grammatically correct" and "how people actually talk here."

Emailing a professor with "Respected Sir, I am writing this mail to kindly inform you that I am unable to attend tomorrow's class due to health issue" is grammatically fine, but it reads as unusually formal for Canadian academic culture, where professors are typically addressed by name (or "Professor Smith," or even just "Hi Dr. Smith") and emails tend to be shorter and more direct: "Hi Professor Smith, I'm not feeling well and won't be able to make it to class tomorrow. Could you let me know if I'm missing anything important? Thanks, [Name]."

Group work in Canadian classrooms also has different conversational norms than what many Indian students are used to — there's often an expectation that you'll jump into disagreement more directly ("I actually see it differently — here's why") rather than deferring heavily to whoever spoke first or holds seniority. This isn't a grammar issue exactly, but it's tied closely to confidence in English, and it's worth practicing the phrasing of polite disagreement specifically, since it doesn't come up much in traditional English education back home: "That's a fair point, but I'd push back on..." or "I see where you're coming from, though I'd frame it a bit differently."

How to Actually Fix These Habits (Not Just Know About Them)

Reading a list like this is useful, but it won't rewire the habit on its own — these patterns are deeply automatic because they were learned young and reinforced for years. A few things genuinely help:

Read English that was professionally edited, every day, even for fifteen minutes. Newspapers (The Globe and Mail, CBC, or even Indian outlets like The Hindu, which is edited to a high standard), well-written blogs, or a novel. The goal isn't to study grammar rules from it — it's to let your ear absorb where articles land, how tenses shift, and how sentences are built, the same passive way you absorbed your first language.

Record yourself speaking for two minutes on a random topic, then listen back. This feels awkward the first time, but it's one of the fastest ways to catch tense-mixing and dropped articles, because you'll hear the mistakes in a way you never notice while speaking live.

Think in English, not just speak in English. A lot of the awkward phrasing comes from constructing a sentence in Hindi (or Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, whatever your first language is) in your head and then translating it word-for-word, which carries over sentence structures that don't exist in English. This is hard to switch off deliberately, but narrating your day silently in English — "I am walking to the bus stop, it is raining a little" — during ordinary moments builds the habit of forming thoughts directly in English instead of translating them.

Get actual feedback, not just self-study. A grammar workbook will teach you the rule for subject-verb agreement, but it won't tell you that you personally tend to make that mistake specifically in sentences longer than fifteen words. A tutor, an IELTS coach, a language exchange partner, or even a patient friend who's willing to correct you consistently, closes that gap much faster than solo study.

Keep a running list of your own repeated mistakes. Not a generic list like this one — your own. After every essay or speaking practice session, write down the specific errors you made. Most people find that they only really make four or five recurring mistakes, not fifty. Once you can name yours specifically, they become much easier to catch in real time.

None of this happens overnight, and that's fine — these are habits built over 15-20 years of speaking a certain way, and a few weeks of focused attention won't erase them completely. But the mistakes covered here are also some of the most fixable in the entire language, precisely because they're patterns, not random errors. Once you know to watch for "since vs. for," or to double-check the real subject in a long sentence, you'll start catching yourself mid-sentence — and that catch, repeated enough times, is what eventually becomes the new habit.