If the cause is not confusion with the past tense chose, it is likely to be the influence of lose. It is quite a common error as well to spell choose with one “o”. Spelling errors caused by the spelling of another word seem to happen quite often in English (see 188. The fact that the similarly-sounding choose is spelt as it is must also contribute to the incorrect spelling of lose. The illogicality is that – ose is not the normal English way of spelling the /u:z/ sound– elsewhere it represents the different vowel of hose and rose (see 29. The difficulty for learners, I think, is that once again English is being less logical than they are (a common occurrence – see 10. The error is rarely overcome by explanations that loose is an adjective opposite in meaning to tight and rhyming with goose (with the “s” pronounced /s/ and not /z/). One of the most frequent verb form errors is to spell lose with an extra “o” ( *loose). The purpose of this post is to highlight some of the most common problems of this kind, and to suggest some reasons why they might occur.
Some are even a problem for mother tongue English speakers. Within such lists, some verb forms seem to be much harder to remember than others, regardless of the learner’s first language. Memorisation thus focuses on lists like this: Participles Placed Just After their Noun). Hence elementary learners of English soon find that the irregularities come down to two per verb: the simple past tense and the “past” participle (see 52. Since there is no consistency in the way they break the rules, the unexpected forms usually have to be memorised individually.Īctually, memorising irregular verb forms is not as burdensome in English as it is in many other languages, the reason probably being the English preference for auxiliary verbs – which are less prone to irregularities – over pronunciation changes. However – again as in most other languages – some verbs break these rules, varying their forms in quite unexpected and sometimes surprising ways, and are said as a result to be “irregular”.
Most of these variations follow predictable rules, so that knowing how to change one verb in order to express a particular meaning gives the ability to change most other verbs in the same way. see/sees/saw), but most involve the addition of one or more new words (“auxiliary verbs”), either with or without a change in the original verb ( e.g. Some of these forms are made just by changing (or even not changing) the spelling and/or pronunciation of the verb ( e.g. Like most languages, English has a wide variety of verb “forms” to express such meanings as “number”, “person”, “tense”, “voice” and “mood”. There are good reasons why some irregular verbs in English are harder to remember than others VERB FORM IRREGULARITIES IN ENGLISH