Common English Mistakes Russian Speakers Make (and How to Fix Them)

Ten predictable mistakes, and I have made them all

Russian speakers make a predictable set of English mistakes: dropped articles, a missing "be" verb, "I very like it", "depends from", and "I feel myself fine". The reason is structural. Russian has no articles, no present-tense "to be", no perfect tenses, and a free word order driven by emphasis instead of grammar — English does the opposite on every point, and each gap produces one specific error. I am a Russian speaker, and every mistake in this article is one I have personally made, some of them for years.

That predictability is good news. The common English mistakes Russian speakers make are a short list, and once you see the Russian pattern behind each one, you can catch it in your own drafts. This whole family of errors is called L1 interference — your first language leaking into your second. Here are the ten patterns that do the most damage, each with the Russian habit behind it and a fast fix. The leak is consistent enough that a playful tool can often guess your L1 from your English alone.

1. Missing articles (a, an, the)

Russian has no articles. «Я написал письмо» (ya napisal pismo) is just "I wrote letter" — context tells the listener whether it is a specific letter or some letter. English forces the choice in every sentence, and there is no Russian habit to lean on.

Off: "I wrote letter to manager and sent document."
Native: "I wrote a letter to the manager and sent the document."

This is the most systematic Russian-speaker error of all, and it is famously fossilized. I still drop articles in fast drafts after two decades of English. A working rule: first mention of a countable thing takes "a" or "an"; a thing your reader can already identify takes "the". The full system is in the guide to a, an, and the for article-less languages.

2. The missing "be" verb

Modern Russian drops the present-tense "to be": «Он врач» (on vrach) is literally "He doctor". The verb simply is not there to translate, so it vanishes in English too.

Off: "He doctor. She very smart. They at home."
Native: "He is a doctor. She is very smart. They are at home."

The fix is mechanical: find every present-tense sentence with no verb and insert is, am, or are.

3. "I very like it"

Russian очень (ochen) happily sits before the verb: «я очень люблю кофе» (ya ochen lyublyu kofe) is literally "I very love coffee". English "very" refuses to modify a verb, so the direct transfer produces one of the clearest signatures of Russian-English writing.

Off: "I very like this idea. It very helped us."
Native: "I really like this idea. It helped us a lot."

The fix is a swap, not a rule: verb + "very" becomes "really" before the verb, or "very much" / "a lot" after the object.

4. Present perfect trouble: "I know him five years"

Russian has no perfect tenses. It handles aspect through verb pairs like делать / сделать (delat / sdelat), and a situation that began in the past and continues now takes the plain present: «я знаю его пять лет» (ya znayu yego pyat let), "I know him five years." English demands the present perfect for exactly that meaning, and because nothing in Russian corresponds to have + past participle, the form feels alien for years.

Off: "I know him five years. I work here since 2022."
Native: "I have known him for five years. I have worked here since 2022."

A related slip is "since" versus "for": Russian covers both with one construction, so they get swapped. Use "for" with a length of time (for five years) and "since" with a starting point (since 2022), both with the present perfect.

5. Preposition calques: "depends from," "discuss about," "wait him"

Russian verbs come with their own prepositions, and translating them word-for-word produces a calque — a phrase built from English words on a Russian frame. Зависит от (zavisit ot) is literally "depends from," so that is what comes out. Обсуждать (obsuzhdat) takes a direct object, but the pull of «говорить о» (talk about) adds an "about" where English wants none. And ждать (zhdat) takes its object directly, so the "for" after "wait" disappears.

Off: "It depends from the budget. Let's discuss about it while we wait him."
Native: "It depends on the budget. Let's discuss it while we wait for him."

Off: "On the picture you can see our office."
Native: "In the picture you can see our office."

There is no shortcut here: English verb-preposition pairs are arbitrary and must be memorized as units. Depends on, wait for, listen to, graduate from, discuss (nothing).

6. "I feel myself fine"

Чувствовать себя (chuvstvovat sebya) is reflexive in Russian; the себя is grammatically required. English "feel" is not reflexive, so the transferred "myself" is not just redundant; to a native ear it can sound unintentionally physical.

Off: "I feel myself much better today."
Native: "I feel much better today."

The rule of thumb: if the reflexive comes from Russian grammar rather than from actual meaning, delete it. «Представьте себе» is just "imagine," not "imagine yourself."

7. "Advices," "informations," "knowledges"

Совет (sovet) is a fully countable noun in Russian: «два совета» (dva soveta) is literally "two advices," and it sounds perfectly normal. Знания (znaniya) is routinely plural. In English, advice, information, knowledge, news, and research are uncountable: no plural, no "a" in front.

Off: "She gave me two advices and many useful informations."
Native: "She gave me two pieces of advice and a lot of useful information."

If you need to count them, count the container: a piece of advice, an item of news, a body of research. And keep the verb singular: "the news is bad," not "the news are bad."

8. Verb calques: "make a photo," "make homework," "say me"

Russian делать (delat) covers territory that English splits between make, do, and take. «Сделать фото» (sdelat foto) comes out as "make a photo," and «делать домашнее задание» (delat domashneye zadaniye) as "make homework." For «заниматься спортом» (zanimatsya sportom), my school textbooks taught the fossil "go in for sports," a phrase that sounds dated to modern native ears.

Off: "We made photos, then I made my homework."
Native: "We took photos, then I did my homework."

Off: "Say me the truth. How do you call this?"
Native: "Tell me the truth. What do you call this?"

The high-frequency set to memorize: take a photo, do homework, play sports (or "work out"), make a decision, make a mistake, do research, tell someone something.

9. Word order as emphasis

Russian word order is free because case endings mark who does what to whom, and Russians use that freedom for emphasis: «эту книгу я читал» (etu knigu ya chital) fronts the object — "This book I have read" — to stress this book. English word order is rigid subject-verb-object, and it carries grammar, not emphasis. Transferred Russian orderings read as poetic at best and confusing at worst.

Off: "This book I read last year. Very interesting was the ending."
Native: "I read this book last year. The ending was very interesting."

When you want emphasis in English, use words instead of movement: "I did read this book," "It was the ending that surprised me." Keep the subject before the verb and let vocabulary do the emphasizing.

10. False friends: actual, accurate, sympathetic, magazine

Russian borrowed heavily from French and German, and many of those borrowings look identical to English words while meaning something else. These false cognates are dangerous precisely because they feel safe — the word looks familiar, so you never think to check it. Spell-check will never catch them.

Off: "This question is very actual. He is a sympathetic person."
Native: "This question is very relevant. He is a likable person."

The medical one deserves a special warning: telling an English-speaking doctor that your relative "had an insult" will not communicate what you think it does. If a sentence built on a look-alike word gets a strange reaction, the look-alike is the first suspect.

A quick self-check before you send

How Diglot helps Russian speakers

Diglot exists because of this exact list. I built it as a Russian speaker who kept making these mistakes in English: the missing articles, the calques, the "actual" that was not actually actual. A generic checker sees a grammatical sentence like "This question is very actual" and passes it, because nothing is technically broken. A checker that knows the Russian-English pair sees the calque underneath.

• Catch L1-transfer errors in context. The grammar checker for Russian speakers is tuned for the article, copula, tense, and false-friend slips above — the errors that come specifically from thinking in Russian.
• Rewrite translated-sounding sentences. The Russian-speaker paraphrasing tool turns word-for-word translations into natural English while keeping your meaning.
• Learn the pattern, not just the fix. Each suggestion explains why, so your next draft has fewer of the same mistakes. For the complete tour of these habits, read the field guide to Runglish, written by a native speaker of it.

Your English is already good enough to communicate. Mine was too, for years, while I was still making every mistake on this page. The gap between "good enough" and "reads as fluent" is this short list. Add the article, restore the "be", drop the "myself", and your writing stops sounding translated and starts sounding like you.

Try the grammar checker for Russian speakers