For example, English speakers commonly mix up your/you’re or there/their/they’re. I’m curious about similar mistakes in other languages.
Lithuanian here.
What mostly grinds my gears is Lithuanians taking an English word and adding a Lithuanian ending, and often even a wrong one:
breakupinosi instead of išsiskyrė, faitinosi instead of mušėsi , etc.
Some other gripes include optimaliausias i.e. most optimal. Optimal is already the best, what is the point of saying bestest?
Adding pointless phrases like ta prasme i.e. in that meaning is also common but seen as a major style error.
In Korean we have these conjugated forms. They both sound the same:
- 나아
[](from 낫다) be/become better - 낳아
[](from 낳다) give birth (to a baby)
So when given A as an example:
(A) 감기에 걸렸어요. I got a cold.
(B) 빨리 나으세요! Hope you get better soon!
© 빨리 낳으세요! Hope you give birth soon!For some reason Koreans across all ages write C instead of B by mistake. It became a national joke at this point and some do it ironically on purpose. I used to teach Korean. Imagine my face every time.
There are more but I’m on my phone. Will do more later.
the laguage is evolving, don’t stop it grow
laguage
- 나아
I’m Spanish, n and ñ are different letters. They are not substitutes. It is the difference between someone being 5 years old and someone having 5 anuses.
“Yo tengo 5 años / yo tengo 5 anos”
Looking at you, Will Shortz
I am guilty of doing that but only because my computer keyboard doesn’t have an ñ.
or configure your keyboard as English international, dead tildes. You can use ~ with an n to produce an ñ. At least in gnu/Linux that’s easy to do
At least in gnu/Linux
I only use Linux. Because Stallman doesn’t need to ride coattails to be a somebody.
How are you not using GNU stack with your Linux kernel?
Less. It’s used eveywhere, although should only be used with uncountable nouns.
Less drama is prefered.
Fewer items left on the shopping list.
There’s a certain level of irony in correcting people’s language while not reading the original question properly yourself.
yeah, fewer drama is prefered from them
Muphry’s law in action.
:D unbeliebable. My bad.
Ignoring the fact that OP was asking about non-English mistakes: the less/fewer distinction isn’t something that grew naturally. Some people writing down their opinions on grammar decided that the words indicate countable versus uncountable nouns, but that distinction wasn’t present in the language many people actually spoke. The first time someone made the distinction was in a comment about the author’s linguistical style preference rather than as a rule.
The entire thing is an invented construct taught in schools that doesn’t reflect how people use the language. Linguistic prescriptivism is ridiculous and grammer (and preferably spelling, though that ship has sailed for English) should reflect how people use the language rather than be limited by the opinions and rules of the people writing the dictionaries and text books.
I’ve never heard “I need at fewest three eggs” despite its supposed grammatical correctness. It’s been centuries and still we try to hammer the less/fewer distinction into kids, it’s time to give up and accept either already.
Thank you! I often feel the urge to use “less” before a countable noun despite knowing that I’m supposed to use “fewer.” Good to know that it isn’t just me.
I see your point, but my personal view is that I like order. I don’t even care too much about specific kind of order. Chaotic-looking things can also be in-order (my favourite example is Vietnamese traffic).
I would argue
at leastis not equal tothe least. It’s a different word, despite being spelt the same. There are a few examples like that which, unfortunately, escape me at the moment.Also, don’t mean any offence, but text is difficult to relay that - I’ve literally loled at you mispelling
grammarin the sentence talking about grammar and spelling :DI’m actually with you - building out our plural system would be a satisfying direction for English to go. Unfortunately, I don’t see “at fewest” catching on. Maybe I’ll try it out a few.
If you look at non-standard dialects of English, it seems like the most natural thing is for the aspect system to grow out as the language evolves further (and unfortunately lose some of it’s symmetries).
At least and the least both use the same “least”. The context of their use mag be different, but if we’re sticking to strict grammar as written down by the booke, they’re both superlatives of “little”. The usage of less and least changed a bit when English dropped a bunch of grammatical cases over the years (“less of words” became “less words” because of this) but the word hasn’t changed much other than that the spelling got reformed a few hundred years ago to match pronunciation more closely.
I swear to god autocorrect is trying its bery hardest to turn grammar into grammer and I have no idea why. I’ve explicitly told it not to suggest grammer again but it keeps trying to incorrectly correct me. I blame AI.
In portuguese, there’s a lot of people who insist on using “mais” (plus, more) instead of “mas” (but). How you speak it ends up being nearly identical, so that’s the reason, much like the there/their/they’re in english.
In Swedish people often confuse de/dem(they/them kind of) and I honestly don’t know exactly when to differentiate. You often learn to replace the word with another like vi/oss(we/us) to see if the sentence still sounds good and then you know the form you should use
And even worse, using personal pronouns exclusively in subject form, e.g. “till han” (“to he”) instead of in object form where suitable, e.g. “till honom” (“to him”).
my go to for remembering which one to use is translating the sentence to english and if “the” or “they” is correct use “de” and if “them” is correct use “dem” (remember by thinking dem = them)
De/dem is simply the subject form and the object form of the same word, they and them respectively. The reason for the common confusion surrounding the use of these, as it might not be quite clear to a non-swedish speaker, is that both of them are pronounced in the same way nowadays: “dom”. As the comment above suggests, just using another subject/object pronoun such as vi/oss (we/us) usually works as they are clearly pronounced in different ways and therefore gets more automatically correct.
Why the words for they/them have evolved to both sound the same and not really that close to how either of them are written I do not know, but the wrong use in text annoys me quite a lot. Personally, I’m all for ditching the differentiation and just default to always writing “dom” as that better reflects the spoken language.
On another tangent, Swedes also often “särskriver” - write two words apart when they should be put together. A fun example of that that I’ve seen is “kassa personal” (~crappy staff) which really should be “kassapersonal” (checkout staff).
In Thai folks stopped saying -ร -ล clusters outside of educated/business settings & has led to spelling errors popping up everywhere. An example: กร- is a common start to words, but the most popular dish, กะเพรา (ga-prao), is seen as กระเพรา, กระเพา, or even กะเพา.
In Portuguese, verbs have a ton of variations. They are written in a different way if you’re talking about yourself, or the listener, or a third party, then additional differences for the plural of those variations. Plus several other things.
And people often write very poorly, using i instead of e is pretty common. Skipping question marks too. Sometimes you’ll get a text from someone saying just “consegui” (meaning “I’ve managed to do it”) when the person actually wanted to say “consegue?” (“can you do it?”)
ITT: English speakers complaining about English speakers
I’m Italian and I can’t stand people using “piuttosto che” (which means “rather than”) with the meaning of “or”.
Correct:
Piuttosto che fare un errore, stai zitto.
Rather than making a mistake, keep quiet.
Wrong:
Posso mangiare dell’insalata piuttosto che dei pomodori.
I can eat a salad [“rather than” with the meaning of “or”] tomatoes.
Couple days ago…just no. Couple OF days ago.
I am a non-native speaker of Vietnamese. There are some pretty horrible mistakes you can make, honestly. I’ll go through a few of them.
In Vietnamese, non-native speakers often confuse the word for ‘mother in law’ with the word for the male genitalia.
Also the word for “large” with the word for the female genitalia. So when ordering e.g. a large meal, if in doubt, just use the word for L (“luh”) instead of lớn.
When referring to your mother-in-law, practice with your partner before the first meeting. Then, quickly ask for permission to call her “mother”, which is easier for non-native speakers to pronounce.
Finally, the word for ‘martial arts’ and ‘Vietnamese wife’ differs only by a single tone. If you make the mistakes above, you may perhaps find out why that is – usually via the medium of a flung sandal :P
-
could of (could’ve)
-
try and (try to)
-
if I was… (if I were)
-
effect/affect
-
less / fewer
-
not adapting adjectives, like “this fits real good” (really well)
-
That English natives have so much trouble distinguishing effect from affect keeps surprising me.
As for Dutch, the dt-issue is presented as if it is this hugely complicated set of rules. While in reality it is dead simple. Third person in the present time is ALWAYS conjugated as stem+t for regular verbs, except in ONE case: when the stem already ends in t. Dt isn’t special, it’s just the rule applied to all stems.
Third person in the present time is ALWAYS conjugated as stem+t for regular verbs
It gets more complicated in the second person though, with the inversion exception.
My school taught this whole convoluted system that was meant to help students with multiple tenses, but I just learned to apply the “ik loop” mnemonic which is so effortless (to native speakers at least.)
Sometimes I have to think once or twice about soft ketchup/'t Kofschip for the past participle, but that’s about it.
I think this is common to most languages: English speakers lecturing native speakers about how they’re grammatically incorrect based on some rule printed in an entry-level language textbook.
I once saw a white dude confidently assert to a Japanese person that 全然 could not be used in the positive and only in the negative. Dude wouldn’t even back down after the Japanese speaker got out their phone and showed him a famous 12th century (or something) poem that used 全然 in the affirmative. That’s like trying to correct someone’s grammar and then getting shut down by Shakespeare.
