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.
“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
A lot of it is just level of attention and effort…
A native speaker isn’t going to give a fuck, or even read their comment/post for sending it. Lots of their mistakes involve autocorrect
Someone who is nervous about how good their English is, will review and catch stuff and fix it.
They’re putting time and effort, and still feeling self-conscious.
Which is why we’ll see an absolutely perfect English comment followed by: Sorry for my terrible English, I hope that made sense! When it’s written at a higher grade level than our newspapers are.
Like think of speaking English as golf. Someone whose been playing their whole lives, but never actually took lessons versus someone who started last year, but has been working hard and taking lessons.
They may get the same score, but it’s hard to say they’re equal. One is actively trying to improve, and will soon and eventually surpass the “natural”.
“only” English has problems with homophones, apostrophe placement, and using slang where it’s not appropriate Someone whose been playing their whole lives
I believe this means you learned English first! Haha
If we are going to use the golf analogy, you also have a difference in the players.
The “natural” may not need to get better. They’ve probably got a family spot in the country club and they are golfing more for a social aspect. It may help to know how to golf for business, but they are good enough.
Meanwhile, the people studying golf are more motivated since they’ve likely hit some career ceilings that require them to learn. They may not know the culture around golf that the natural knows, but they know they need to get good and will practice so they don’t embarrass themselves on the links.
Sure…
But when golfing for business, it’s about the social aspect, not the best technical play.
Which still fits with the example.
Someone that speaking over formally and paying real close attention to grammar/phrasing is going to seem “off”.
Like, recognizing “other” is something baked into humans. We’re still wired to be suspicious of people who don’t look like what we grew up around, or don’t act like we’re used to.
And just on a basic level, we don’t like people who “try to hard” because it makes us suspicious they have ulterior motives. Which, in business golf everyone does. That’s the entire point of it.
The best way for an ESL to fit in with Americans, is to just stop caring so much. Which pretty much brings us full circle.
It’s why rich Japanese families will pay random Americans who don’t speak Japanese to hang out with their kids. They don’t want the kid to just know “textbook English” they want their kid to know slang and idioms so that when the kid grows up, you won’t be able to tell them apart from a native speaker. They intentionally practice throwing in an “um” or “like” so even the cadence and speed sounds American. Like, intentionally teaching the kids to start talking before they know what they’re gonna say… Because that’s how you fit in with Americans. I had no idea where this was going when I started typing for example.
If you learn English from a textbook and a class, an American will instantly notice. Because while it might not be perfect, weird shit we usually do wrong is what sounds normal.
Its all subconscious shit, it’s not like the native speakers do it intentionally, they might not be able to say why something feels off, it just is.
Which is a huge culture change for an immigrant who had to bust ass just to get on the course. They got there from trying as hard as they can, but at some point they need to start acting like an American and just not really caring.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
It’s easy to read, but it also reads like the written equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
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.
Of have drives me crazy!
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.
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.
: )
