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Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

You ever thought that everyone on HN might not be American or speak english as a first language? Its a comment on an internet forum, there is no need for the active grammar schooling. Your trivial, holier-than-thou, grammer nazi bullshit actively discourage other posters who may not speak english fluently from posting. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7233681

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While I agree that correcting grammar isn't usually that productive, I think that mixing up "your" and "you're" is probably indicative of a native English speaker.

I doubt that "your" and "you're" are homophones in most other languages. As a native English speaker myself, I often slip up and write "your" when I mean "you're" because they both sound the same in my head and it's quicker to type "your".

I think that a non-native speaker would be less like to make this mistake, because it requires the writer to decide to contract the pronoun and the verb and then forget to use an apostrophe.

I think this is far more likely to happen if you're simply typing out a stream of consciousness than if you're translating your thoughts from a different language.

Yes, as a non-native, I agree that it is not very common (almost never) for me to mix them up because I prononunce them differently.

Another reason non-natives don't do this mistake might be that usually they are thought the written language first, so schools concentrate on grammatical issues more.

Adding another datapoint, as a non-native speaker myself, I believe I've rarely (if ever) mixed them up.

As the parent commenter said, I've also noticed in the past that this mix up occurs usually among native English speakers. I've noticed it with other languages too, that native speakers often mix up homophones, probably because as a native speaker you write as you would speak and either you don't care or don't even think about it.

As a non-native speaker I agree with this. But I've noticed something interesting: before I was aware that mixing up the two was common with native speakers it would never happen in my own writing, but once I realized people do make this mistake I became susceptible to making it too. I still don't, but now I sometimes have to make a conscious effort to differentiate the two. It's amazing where social learning can show it's effects. (And BTW, I think I would just kill myself if I ever mixed up affect and effect, I see that a lot, and for some reason it annoys the hell out of me.)

I hope you do realize that the errors are much harder to interpret for the non-native speakers? Where the native speaker understands, that the writer simply mixed up two words, the non-native speaker wastes a lot of time trying to parse the sentence without correcting the error. I've seen it happen many times with my colleagues.

Thanks for pointing this out.

It may seem obvious, but I never before considered how the simple grammatical mistakes I frequently make disproportionately hinder the ability of non-native speakers to efficiently comprehend my posts.

Your comment has given me an extra incentive to carefully proofread my future HN comments before posting.

OK, sure. I get it. I think this is a place to offer ideas great and small that might give each other a hand. If this kind of tip is not appropriate, I certainly don't need to chip in.

I agree with the other comment that this thread is toxic. I didn't intend that. I guess I learned a lesson.

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