100 Mistakes #9 - There is / there are

The most useful and most forgettable construction in English is: there is / there are.

In the simplest situations, we use it to talk about the things or people that exist (in a place.)

For example:

There isn't any beer in the fridge.
There are three bowls of soup but no bears.

It's difficult to remember because other languages talk about existence in a completely different way.

Some languages use a 'have' construction - in French, 'il y a'; in Spanish, 'hay'.

Il n'y a pas de bière dans le frigo.
Hay tres platos de sopa pero no hay ningún oso.

So translating directly from those languages into English would be a disaster!

It doesn't have beer there in the fridge.
Has three bowls of soup but no have no bears.

Note also that we do not use 'there is / there are' with a time clause:

There is two years that I lived in France.

There were two years since I lived in France.

I lived in France two years ago.

We can use there is / there are in different tenses or modified by modal verbs... and the notion of 'existence' can sometimes be abstract:

There was a strange man standing in the corner.

There was no point in continuing the conversation.

There hasn't been a significant earthquake in the UK since 1984.

Has there been much support for the policy?

Do you think there will be enough time to register my vote?

There won't be any more mistakes.
Should there be an investigation?
There might have been a serious problem. 

One more important point:

We use there is / there are when we talk about how many people are present at an event, even when you are a member of the group.

(No one ever remembers this. Your mind will always think "We... ", when it should be thinking "There are / there were..." You'll probably need to get a tattoo.)

There were at least 20 people.

We were four.

We were four people.

There were four people of us.

There were four of us.

They were 15.

There were 15 of them.

How many are you?

How many of you are there?

If you say "We are 20" it means that you and your friends are 20 years old.

Notice that this isn't a problem in Romance languages because you 'have' age - tengo 36 años. In English, we 'are' age - I am 36.