Speakers of non-English languages, what common mistakes do native speakers make that drive you crazy?
Speakers of non-English languages, what common mistakes do native speakers make that drive you crazy?
For example, English speakers commonly mix up your/you're or there/their/they're. I'm curious about similar mistakes in other languages.
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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?
I didn’t know about that. I’ll have to give it a try, I hate trying to write Portuguese on my PC because I can’t use the accents
Liar you just used it. Just admit you don't like ñ's dope haircut.
I'm not on my computer. My phone keyboard does all sorts of fun crazy things; some of them are even intentional.
Use double n, that’s the archaic way of spelling that (tilde derives from n on top of another n)
For people on Linux, hit [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[u] then type [0] [0] [f] [1]. That will enter an ñ when you hit the next key.
For people on Linux, enable the compose key in your keyboard settings and then type [Compose] [n] [~].
The compose-key method for entering accented letters is by far the easiest to use for any desktop OS ... but it's not enabled by default because you have to give up some modifier key to use it.
It's completely off-topic but Compose is amazing. Specially as you can actually customise it for your usage, with a .XCompose file. For me it's the only think that makes phonetic transcription flow, otherwise you got to shift layouts back and forth to write something like "[tɾɐ̃skɾi'sɜ̃ʊ̯] ⟨transcrição⟩".
Based solely off this comment, I just wanna say you seem like such a cool person. Anyone who has a custom file on their OS to facilitate using IPA characters is good people in my book.
ñ...woah! I just tried it by switching the [Menu] key to a compose key. That's so much easier. Thanks for sharing 🙂
I never knew that there was such a key! Thank you! It's really useful.
On windows, hold 'alt' and then type the numbers 1 6 4 for lower case and 1 6 5 for upper case ñ.
That's their places in the ASCII table, you can do that with any special characters, look up their place in the ASCII table, press alt and the respecting number, release alt and voila.
SO many people don't know the ALT+Number combo nowadays it's surprising. I learnt about it in 4th grade in elementary school in 1999.
Be happy that it doesn't: brazilian keyboards added an extra key for "ç" right in the middle of the keyboard and it's pretty useful, until the day you have to use any other keyboard and realize that if you configure it to use the brazilian layout, you're not losing the "ç", you lose the comma, or question mark, or exclamation mark or something much more annoying to be left without.
Now you either learn to type again with another keyboard layout, or spend the rest of your life using only cheap keyboards made in brazil that have the "right amount" of keys.