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Comment by susam | Hacker News Reader

In the #algorithms channel on Libera IRC (earlier on Freenode) that its operators and I have been operating since 2007, we have always had the following note in the channel's topic:

"Don't be sorry for your bad English: http://web.archive.org/web/20100325101243/http://ostatic.com..."

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Well, usually, the worse offenders of the English language are the native English speakers.

They are the ones who make basic mistakes like "it's" in place of "its", "who's", etc and other similar basic mistakes.

Sure, non-native speakers sometimes make mistakes but they're usually specific ones, like picking the wrong verb or preposition, not using an idiomatic expression, etc.

Honestly (as a native speaker) I find the mistakes of native speakers like you describe much more jarring. When I read "to" instead of "too" my brain gets stuck because I "heard" the wrong length of vowel. When an ESL speaker uses an incorrect construction it's much less annoying for a reason I can't really explain - even if it's actually harder to understand. Although I'm hesitant to say it, maybe it's just because they're trying harder.

Sometimes I can even tell what their native language is based on the mistakes when I also speak that language, and it makes me chuckle (e.g. unorthodox commas by German speakers).

yeah I got that one too (non native speaker), where things that sound the same sound different in your brain, even though they don't really if you say them out loud.

A thing I've heard several Germans do (myself also not native speaker btw, not german though), is translate "biss" always as "until", never as "before" or "by". E.g. "we have to hand in the homework until Friday".

It's one of those things that once you've noticed, you keep on noticing and cannot unnotice. You automatically start thinking "wow, that's a lot of handing in! "

Funny, I would think of this as a word order error instead of a vocabulary one. As a native English speaker, I would say or write "we have until Friday to hand in the homework".

It crosses my mind that this may be regional use and not completely standard - I'm honestly not sure.

It could be either one. You could also say, "We have to hand in the homework by Friday." Depends on which meaning of 'have' you're using, with 'have to' meaning 'must' in this case, as opposed to having an amount of time.

I had a moment of confusion wondering why one would translate "biss" as "until" instead of "bite". "Bis" with one S is the word that should sometimes be translated as "until", "before" or "by". Another one is "seid" which is always translated as "since" but should sometimes be "for" (e.g. "I've worked here since four years")

Funnily enough the reverse also happens. Native Dutch speakers will use the Dutch translation of since (in the sense of "ever since") to say because (i.e. "since" in the sense of "since you didn't call, we left without you"). This is an Anglicism, because "sinds" doesn't mean that at all! Or at least, not yet :)

To be pedantic you mean "seit" (since/until), not "seid" as in "ihr seit laut" (you [plural] are loud).

To clear things up a bit, the correct spellings are:

- „ihr seid laut“: you are loud (seid is the second person plural form of to be)

- „seit drei Stunden“: for three hours (seit gives a temporal reference)

- „bis am Freitag“: by friday (in the context of homework)

- „der Biss“: the bite

There's also the use of sein (bin):

Ich bin seit fünf Jahren in Hamburg.

which in English Germans will often say: I am living since five years in Hamburg. Whereas nobody uses "am" any more in the past perfect in English, but there are some fun examples where it's survived: "Joy to the world, the Lord is come" for example.

Another thing is the use of the dative (not genitive): Der Hund von meinem Vater. If you hear someone say "The dog of my father", that's really really German and something no native would say, they're just directly translating the above dative construct into English.

Lastly there's the misuse of wie/how. Wie heißt das? In German English, "how do you call that"? But in English it's "what is that called"? Although actually this problem goes far beyond just Germans speaking English. Also: how does it look = correct, how does it look like = wrong. Slavic native speakers make this mistake as well for example, and probably many more.

My German is rusty at best, but wouldn't one say "Der Hund meines Vaters" - or something like that but with correct grammar?

That's the genitive but in every day speech typically people use the dative. The genitive case is slowly dying out.

I'm not sure which I find most jarring, but "should of" is definitely up there.

I think it's that usually ESL mistakes make sense. Generally it's going to be because they generalized a rule that doesn't apply in that particular case, or that they've used a construction from their native language that is different in English. Whereas native speakers do weird things like using "they're" for "there" as I mentioned in another comment. Obviously you can still understand how that mistake happens, but it doesn't feel logical in the same way that many ESL mistakes do.

My pet pevee is "loose" as lose.

And what about this now common usage of “they” instead of he/she? As a non-native speaker it always makes me go “who the heck are ‘they”? If it’s OK to offend the grammar to avoid offending people, why not just go all the way and also change the conjugation? “They is” sounds just as jarring but it’s not confusing and with time it will become natural.

That said, I also have trouble with plural “you” and there is no fix for that other than the hideous (and sexist) “you guys”.

English is not my first language, and even though I used not to make these kind of homophone mistakes, I started making them once I became fluent.

Tangentially but on topic, you have me questioning whether "used not to" is grammatically correct in English. I would say, "I used to not make these kinds of homophone mistakes," and the other phrasing definitely sounds wrong to me, but I'm not 100% confident it is.

I stumbled on it, but didn't bother checking :-)

It appears that "used not to" is not common. "Never used to", or "didn't use to" would have been better.

The texting culture we have today only makes matters worse. I'm seeing more people not capitalizing the first word of a sentence, ending declarations with question marks, puting a space between the sentence and the question mark, etc...

Even worse than it's/its and who's, which in my opinion can at least be understandable mistakes, are things like when someone uses "they're" in place of "there" or "their". I could understand mixing up the latter two, but it's like, what do you think the apostrophe means, exactly??

Obviously the answer is that they don't think about it at all, but it is indeed a bit jarring.

"would of" "could of" are mistakes which no non-native speaker would make.

Often it’s just a humble brag.

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