Escaping for DB?

Question

PHP

Hello.
My problem is this:
English sentences have an apostrophe, so they need to be escaped for the database. This code does not work (nothing is written to the database), but if you remove the mysql_real_escape_string function, everything is written, except for those sentences that contain apostrophes. Where did I go wrong?

<?php
    include('db.php');

    $dataJSON = $_POST['data'];
    $arrData = json_decode($dataJSON, true);

    for($i = 0; $i < count($arrData); $i++) {
        for($j = 0; $j < count($arrData[$i]); $j++) {
            $english_sentence =  mysql_real_escape_string( $arrData[$i]['english-sentence'] );
            $russian_sentence =  mysql_real_escape_string( $arrData[$i]['russian-sentence'] );
        }

        mysqli_query($connection, "INSERT INTO `words` (`english-sentence`, `russian-sentence`) VALUES ('$english_sentence', '$russian_sentence')");
        
    }
?>