Common English mistakes Arabic speakers make

Arabic and English differ in sound system, sentence structure, and how (or whether) a sentence needs a verb "to be" at all — three separate sources of the patterns that show up again and again in Arabic speakers' English, independent of vocabulary level.

"B" instead of "P" (and other sound substitutions)

Standard Arabic has no /p/ sound, only /b/ — so words like "pen," "people," or "apple" often come out as "ben," "beoble," "abble." This is a genuine sound-system gap, not a knowledge gap: the mouth simply hasn't built the /p/ sound as a separate category from /b/.

Fix: practise minimal pairs out loud specifically — "pen/Ben," "cap/cab," "pig/big" — noticing that /p/ has no vocal buzz (put a hand on your throat: /b/ vibrates, /p/ doesn't) while /b/ does.

Dropping "is/am/are" ("He happy", "I student")

In Arabic, a present-tense sentence like "He [is] happy" or "I [am] a student" doesn't need an equivalent of "to be" at all — the sentence is grammatically complete without it. Carried into English, this produces "He happy" or "I student," missing the verb English requires.

Fix: in English, almost every sentence needs a verb, and a simple description or identity needs "is/am/are": "He is happy," "I'm a student." If there's no other verb in the sentence, check specifically whether "is/am/are" is missing.

Adjective before or after the noun, inconsistently

Arabic adjectives normally come after the noun they describe, the reverse of English. This occasionally leaks through as "car red" instead of "red car," especially under time pressure in speech.

Fix: in English, the adjective goes before the noun: "red car," "big house." This becomes automatic quickly with repetition — it's more a fluency habit than a knowledge gap once you're aware of it.

No capital letters carried into English writing

Arabic script has no concept of capital vs. lowercase letters at all, so capitalization in English writing (the start of a sentence, "I," proper names) is sometimes skipped entirely — not from carelessness, but because it's a genuinely new writing convention with no equivalent to transfer from.

Fix: this is purely a writing-convention rule to memorize and check consciously: capitalize the first letter of every sentence, the word "I," and all proper names (people, places, days, months).

Common questions

Why does the p/b mix-up persist even for fluent, advanced Arabic speakers?

Because it's a sound-perception issue built in early childhood, not a vocabulary gap — the ear and mouth never learned to treat /p/ and /b/ as different sounds in the first place. It usually needs targeted pronunciation drilling (minimal pairs, spoken repetition) rather than more reading or grammar study to fix.

What should I ask a tutor to focus on?

Ask specifically for correction on missing "is/am/are" and the p/b sound in live conversation, not just written homework — both are spoken-habit issues that need to be caught and repeated out loud to actually change.