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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 know you're asking for such errors in other languages, but I find it interesting that some of the common english errors are more frequent with native english speakers than with learners of english as a second language.

    A good example of that is using "of" instead of "have".
    Should of... of what?? It makes no sense to me how someone could confuse the two.

    Having learned english as a second language, I learned to read and write it before learning to speak it.
    On the other hand, I'd expect native speakers to have learned spoken english before learning written english.
    I think this difference changes which errors someone is likely to make.
    Native speakers confuse of/have more because they heard it long before writing it.
    People who learned it later are less likely to make that mistake, although they're more likely for some others.

    TL;DR: Native speakers are more likely to make mistakes that are homonyms. Of/have, your/you're, etc.

    As for the spirit of your question, I'll go with french.

    Almost every noun in french is gendered.
    Objects, body parts, concepts, ideas, pretty much anything and everything is gendered.
    It's also super obvious whenever someone doesn't use the correct gender for anything.
    It's also hard to explain to anyone.
    There might be a logic behind it, but I don't know how to summarize any of it.
    I just know it, but couldn't tell you why.

    Some of those make no fucking sense either.
    It has mostly nothing to do with women or men or gebder roles and identity, it just is.
    "Jam" is a feminine noun, yet "butter" is masculine.
    "Bread" is masculine, but a "loaf" is feminine.
    The noun for each and every season are masculine nouns, but the word "season" itself is a feminine noun.
    Also, a "vagina" is a masculine noun, because reasons? Weird.
    Various different words for "testicles" vary between masculine and feminine.

    It's all super obvious to anyone who speaks french, but I never managed to explain it to any speaker of a non-gendered language like english without breaking their minds.

  • I'm a native French speaker, specifically from the Acadian parts of the province of New-Brunswick (Canada). We have a lot of vocabulary, grammar and syntax that people who speak a more standard French might frown upon (lots of borrowing from English but also a lot of old French words which disappeared in Europe but not here, as well as some Indigenous influences). Fuck anyone who judges our dialect and accents, I love the way we speak.

    That being said, there are a few things that bother me:

    1. The pleonasm "plus pire" (most worst, or most most bad). There are a few common pleonasm but this one is the only one that truly irks me for some reason.
    2. "Si que" (if that) because of something that was drilled into me by my dad, "les si n'aiment pas les que" ("the ifs don't like the thats"). Using "si que" is like saying "if that I say this" rather than "if I say this".

    The more I think about it the more I guess my stance on this is that deviating from standard French is fine and even cool when it adds meaning or nuance. I just dislike it when it's purely redundant.

  • 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 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 Turkish de/da can be a suffix or a conjunction or of course a part of a word. If de/da is used as a conjunction you have to write them separately. If it's not written correctly it can be confusing for those who are reading the sentence.

    Example 1:

    "Bende gittim" instead of "ben de gittim." (I've gone too). "Ben de gittim" is the correct sentence. De means too in this example.

    Example 2:

    O da iyi (It is good too). "Da" means "too" in this sentence. Oda iyi (The room is good). "Oda" means "the room". Odada iyi (It is good in the room). 2nd "da" means "in". Oda da iyi. (The room is good too). 2nd "da" means too. Odada da iyi. ( It is good in the room too). 2nd "da" means "in", 3rd "da" means "too".

  • In Spanish to English translation with Google and others, need often to be corrected manually.

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