This is because most East Asian languages actually don’t conjugate their verbs at all!

In Chinese, for example, you always use the same exact verb, you just add extra sounds called “particles” to the sentence to contextualize what you’re saying.

e.g. “I’m going to the store” in Chinese is 我(wǒ - ‘I’)去(qù - ‘go’)商店(shāng diàn - ‘store’). I go store.

To say “I went to the store”, you don’t change “去/qù”. Instead you still just say “I go store”, but you add “了/le” to the end of the sentence. “Le” is a particle that means “to finish; to be completed”.

So to say “I went to the store”, you literally say “I go store (past particle)”, and the listener knows that the statment “I go store” already happened and ended - past tense.

This is why native English speakers often think of this type of grammatical mistake when they think of common English mistakes that East Asian language native speakers make.