"second language" English has problems with articles, unusual plurals, irregular verbs, and tends to an overly formal tone
"only" English has problems with homophones, apostrophe placement, and using slang where it's not appropriate
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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Same is true about second language French speakers. French conjugates articles (or most things, really, the language is extremely gendered) with nouns. E.g. “the father and the mother” would be “le père et la mère” (le/la is the same definite article in masculine/feminine form, it has no neutral form). English speakers get rightfully confused. It gets even more confusing as there’s a clear trend in the language where many feminine gendered words end with an E (porte/door, table/table, arme/weapon), but not always (nuage/cloud, véhicule/vehicle).
extremely gendered
Compared to English - yeah, but in general there's nothing extreme about genders in French.
In what sense? If anything, the very concept of “everything is gendered” makes it sit at one extreme of the spectrum of languages, in the very literal sense of the word, wouldn’t you agree?
It has only 2 genders, and they don't affect verb inflections.
Are there languages with more than 2 genders? That sounds interesting.
In Europe without even anything exotic - German, archaic Dutch and all insular Scandinavian languages, and all Slavic languages. I don't know Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, so I can't talk about them, a plethora of cases, but genders - I don't remember.
The interesting thing to learn is that there are languages with more than 3 genders (M, F and thing). Or even more than 4 (M, F, N and thing), with additional genders being for kinds of animals, fish, plants, buildings, instruments. But I've only heard about that, haven't studied any such language.
I was right! It was interesting. Thanks for the reply.
Interesting with that overly formal tone. Might be due to how school english focuses on correct grammar and vocab, but not necessarily how people actually speak casually. At least that’s how I remember English in high school.
Nonnative: I definitely unable to come.
Native: I am definately unable to come.
People who know other languages tend to model their sentence structure on their native language, and swap word for word. This can lead to conjugation issues, e.g. "I am feeling" instead of "I feel."
People who only know English often base their understanding on the way language sounds, not how it's written.
Ironically, the former is usually much more readable than the latter.
"I am feeling" means something very close to "I feel," whereas "steel" means something completed unrelated to "still."
Still, I'm feeling steel right now and I'm thinking of stealing this piece of steel.
Sushi desu: "Sushi it's!"
Its a shame, I would of sworn I had a list of all native speakers and there annoying errors, because that list would of been longer then big ben.
*must..... not........ react, must..... not........ react..... .. . . . .
I'm gonna swap the question around: Are native English speakers having an easier time reading this, than non-native speakers?
Personally, as a non-native speaker, I feel like having a stroke in trying to decipher it. It's like my brain sees regular words, but not the one it expects to follow on the previous ones.
As a native speaker, it's easy to understand (because it's phonetic) but painful to read because the grammar is so terrible.
Yeah, I didn't have a problem reading it. The most awkward part was the weird comparison to Big Ben. The wrong "there" was the first thing to make me pause and then I saw the joke.
It's easy to read, but it also reads like the written equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
Weirdly I was only about to fall for the "then" at the very end of your sentence
Of have drives me crazy!
because that list would of been longer then big ben.
You usually don't compare bells by their length, weight is much more common. Anyway, Big Ben wouldn't be a particular heavy one.
So hard to understand ><
Having learned English in my teens, I found that native speakers would make errors about things that sound the same (their/there, would of/have, should of, etc). Probably they learned to speak it before writing it, which is the other way around for me (and maybe other ESL speakers, IDK).
That's not to say I or other ESL people don't make errors, we just statistically make different ones.
We often make very different kinds of mistakes. Funnily enough, I initially learned English by getting exposed to pop culture (kung-fu movies, N64 games and anime dubs) through a bilingual friend I had through 3-6th grades. Formal English teaching in schools only started in 4th grade when I was a kid. I didn’t know anything about the language by then. My now 6yo son understands way more of it than I did when I started high school, and speaks it quite a bit.
Native speakers make mistakes when things sound similar, e.g. effect/affect, then/than, etc. For non-native speakers those are very different words because they have a very distinct meaning in our heads so it's impossible for us to confuse them.
On the other hand Non-native speakers tend to use the wrong word order, for example using a lot of "of" (House of my friend/My friend's house) or affirmations that are meant as questions (How you did that?/How did you do that?). This happens because in our native language that's the way phrases are structured, and internalizing the structure of a language happens long after you have enough vocabulary to communicate.
The biggest mistake I notice with non-native speakers is verb conjugation, especially with future tense. This may be because I hang around a lot of Vietnamese ESL people, idk. For example, "I go" instead of "I am going" is a common mistake I see.
For natives, the biggest mistake is misspellings and a lack of punctuation. Occasionally you'll also see excessive punctuation and run-on sentences.
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.
yeah, in some languages it's even more complicated, you have the thing called inflection, we have this here in Polish but some languages went overboard with this like Spanish for example, currently I'm learning Japanese via duolingo and i find it relatively simple
My wife used to work with a ESL Asian person. When he got upset at work he always said "I go to mad."
Keep in mind that some people just have brain-defects.
I'm defective for social-process ( if I could live somehow where I never had to meet another human-being, or never had to even be within 100km of any human-being, only interacting online, .. for the rest of my life .. lower stress .. yeah : )
but not defective for some other things, maybe.
Some people are color-blind, some dyslexic, some are screwed for spelling, some for grammar.
Diversity's more real than I'd ever understood, when I was young..
Evolution's concerned with getting the average right, right?
The individual can be .. chaotically a mixture of better-at-this & moar-worser-at-that, while still keeping the average .. average.
: )