Arabic and English are built on completely different foundations — different sounds, a different alphabet, different grammar, even a different direction of writing. So when an Arabic speaker slips up in English, it’s almost never careless. It’s the logic of Arabic quietly doing its job in the wrong language. Once you can see where a mistake comes from, it stops being a mystery and turns into something you can actually fix. Here are the ones we hear most often at Kensington English, and what to do about each.
Sounds that don’t exist in Arabic
Arabic has no /p/ sound, so p and b tend to collapse into one. “Park” comes out as “bark,” “people” as “beople,” “happy” as “habby.” The same happens with /v/, which Arabic doesn’t have either — “very” drifts into “fery,” “seven” into “sefen.” The fix is physical, not mental. For /p/, hold a sheet of paper in front of your mouth and make it flutter with a puff of air; a /b/ won’t move it. For /v/, rest your top teeth lightly on your bottom lip and let the sound buzz. Then drill minimal pairs — pat/bat, pin/bin, van/fan — until your mouth stops reaching for the Arabic sound.
The extra vowel that sneaks in
English loves to stack consonants together: street, spring, text, asked. Arabic doesn’t allow those clusters, so speakers instinctively break them up with a small vowel. “Street” becomes “istreet” or “sitreet,” “spring” becomes “isbring,” and the past-tense -ed ending grows an extra syllable. There’s nothing wrong with your ear — your mouth is simply reaching for a shape that doesn’t exist in Arabic. Practise the clusters slowly and deliberately, gluing the consonants straight together: s-t-r-eet, no gap, no vowel. Say it in slow motion first, then speed up. It feels unnatural for about a week, and then it doesn’t.
Articles and the missing “to be”
This is the grammar that gives an Arabic speaker away fastest. Arabic has a definite article (al-) but no word for “a” or “an,” so learners either drop the indefinite article (“I am teacher”) or over-use “the” where English wants nothing (“I love the music”). On top of that, Arabic builds simple present-tense sentences with no verb at all — “He teacher,” “She happy,” “The weather beautiful” are complete, correct sentences in Arabic. Carried into English, the verb to be disappears: “He teacher,” “They in London.” Train yourself to check every sentence for two things — does each singular countable noun have a, an or the in front of it, and is there a verb? If you’re saying what something is, you almost always need am, is or are.
Word order and adjectives
In Arabic, adjectives come after the noun and agree with it — the equivalent of “car red” or “house big.” English puts the adjective first and never changes it for number: a red car, two red cars, never “two reds cars.” Arabic also tends to lead longer sentences with the verb, which can leave English statements and questions slightly reshuffled. The rule to hold onto is short: in English, the adjective goes before the noun and stays exactly the same however many things you’re describing.
Capital letters, spelling and silent vowels
Arabic has no capital letters, so the start of a sentence, people’s names and the pronoun “I” are easy to forget. And because short vowels aren’t written in everyday Arabic, English spelling can feel maddeningly arbitrary — words like because, business and Wednesday carry vowels you simply can’t hear, and guessing from the sound won’t save you. Read widely so you meet words spelled correctly again and again, keep a running list of the ones that catch you out, and always capitalise I, the first word of a sentence, and every name. Small habits, but they’re the difference between writing that looks fluent and writing that looks like a first draft.
None of these mistakes mean you’re bad at English — they mean you already think fluently in another language, and that structure is showing through. The quickest way to iron them out is to practise with a teacher who recognises the Arabic pattern behind each slip and corrects it on the spot. Our Essential English courses are built around exactly that kind of feedback, with native teachers who’ll catch the p/b swap or the missing article before it hardens into a habit. If you’d like a plan that takes your English from “understood” to genuinely natural, have a look at our courses and find the one that fits where you are now.
