Mine is people who separate words when they write. I’m Norwegian, and we can string together words indefinetly to make a new word. The never ending word may not make any sense, but it is gramatically correct
Still, people write words the wrong way by separating them.
Examples:
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“Ananas ringer” means “the pineapple is calling” when written the wrong way. The correct way is “ananasringer” and it means “pineapple rings” (from a tin).
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“Prinsesse pult i vinkel” means “a princess fucked at an angle”. The correct way to write it is “prinsessepult i vinkel”, and it means “an angeled princess desk” (a desk for children, obviously)
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“Koke bøker” means “to cook books”. The correct way is “kokebøker” and means “cookbooks”
I see these kinds of mistakes everywhere!
(American) English: Inflammable vs flammable vs non-flammable.
Remember: invaluable is a synonym of priceless, but not of worthless.
tbf it’s referring to the verb “to value”, not the noun. long as you keep that in mind it makes perfect sense
So much of English just does not make sense. lol
The past tense of lead is led, which is pronounced like lead but is not pronounced like lead.
Don’t get me started on read, read, and red…
Ambiguously used words like “biweekly”. Does it mean twice per week? Every other week? Business meeting calendar scheduling terminology is especially bad with this.
Odd phrases like you can chop the tree down. Then but then you proceed to chop that same tree up.
Parking in a driveway and driving in a parkway is also a good one.
A driveway is where you drive to get the residence, vs the walkway. Parkways are landscaped with park-like greenery .
After your alarm goes off… You turn it off.
Norwegian is more accurate. “Biweekly” means “annenhver uke” (every other week)
It does here too. It’s not an unclear thing, just not used all the time so people don’t remember.
Biweekly is every other week, fortnightly.
Semiweekly is twice a week.
It’s not so much a feature of English as it is a recurring bug in the way people use the language…
If you write “of” instead of “have” or “'ve” you need to be taken out back and beaten with a dictionary, preferably until you can apologize to your ancestors in person for the effort they wasted in passing down the English language to you.
Incidentally, when did people start saying “on accident”? It’s by accident! Has been for ages! Why this? Why now? I hate it.
With that out of the way… English isn’t a language, it’s five dialects in a trenchcoat mugging other languages in a dark alley for their loose grammar.
Edit: With regards to OP, “a cookbook” and “to cook the books” are similar phrases in English, too, but have, eh, wildly different meanings. XD
“of” in place of “have” certainly had to come from people mishearing/misunderstanding “ve.” There’s no other explanation.
The accident one is funny. I had to really think about when I’d use “on”, and it’s when I say something like: “he did it on accident.” Which is wrong when I think about it, but I know I’ve said this countless times. I can only guess it grew from “an accident” like “it was an accident.”
Even though "on"and “by” are the same length, “by” sounds like it takes too much effort to say. How weird.
Prepositions are so arbitrary. So it’s really stupid to be so angry about “on accident”. But I can’t help it.
What I hate about English is what I love about English. The spelling.
I hate that it’s an impossible system to teach in any logical way. No child can sound out common words like “once”.
But I love that the ridiculous spelling of our words gives you a look into the history of the language. That it’s not just transliterations of the sounds, but letters in a pattern that holds more information than that.
“Do you mind …” has been mis-answered for so long that yes means no. It’s hard to explain because written down, yes/no have different meanings, but when speaking to someone it depends on tone, context, and body language.
“Do you mind if I take that seat”
“No” “Yeah” depending on tone can both mean, “I’m fine with you taking that seat”. Most people will add on to make the intention clearer like, “Yeah, go ahead” but not always. Absolutely crazy.
Norwegian is easier. If you see a vacant seat, you don’t use it because sitting next to some one is what psychopaths do. You’re not a psychopath, are you?
In these situations, when people say “take that seat”, they usually mean it literally. As in take the seat with them and use it at the table they actually want to sit at.
The problem is that “do you mind if” is really just an indirect way of saying “may I.” People often tend to reply to the actual meaning rather than the literal meaning.
Hebrew. I hate how everything is gendered. You cant communicate with a person without assuming his/her gender. You cant ask “how are you?” or “what is your name?” without using the other person’s gender. Its worse than spanish/italian. We have genders for verbs, our “you” is gendered, heck, NUMBERS have genders (two girls, two boys - you use a different word for two).
Have you ever spoken to a person and werent sure about their gender? In hebrew you would be screwed.
Portuguese is essentially the same.
But voce, tu, and numbers arent gendered though.
você, tu
These pronouns adress the other person directly but the moment I have to ask or say something connected to said person I have to start using gendered words
And numbers can be gendered.
Two girls, two boys.
Duas raparigas, dois rapazes.
And things only get weirder from this point forward. It is possible to have a somewhat genderless conversation but it requires a good degree of effort and it is not a common form of speech.
You can kind of get around the gendered stuff sometimes.
‘How are you’ can be מה נשמע
What’s your name can be איך השם
My language is diglossic - it has a written form and a spoken form that are very different to each other. It’s quite difficult to understand the written form if you’ve only grown up speaking and listening to the language, as the written form is essentially the language as spoken in the 1600s.
To compare it to English, it would be like saying “Where are you?” to someone over the phone, but then having to send them “Wherefore art thou?” as a text.
What is this mysterious language?
Informal English
Sims anlikeli to me
“wherefore” means “why” not “where”.
She wasn’t asking him “where are you?” but rather “why did it have to be you?”
Ah I see, thanks for the correction! (It also kind of demonstrates the problems I have with my own language :P)
Great example. Wherefore doesn’t mean where. Lol
**Don’t mean this snarky. Do find it funny tho.
“Whither” (to where) might be a closer fit than “wherefore” (why)
skill issue
The thing I hate about English is that it pretends to have formal rules for sentence structure and grammar, and they are all basically optional to some degree, but plenty of English speakers get really grumpy when people break them. English isn’t like French where there is a literal governing body who is in charge of setting the formal rules for the language - English is a cluster fuck of borrowed words and structures mashed together in a barely coherent mess, stop acting like “should’a” is a violation of section 16.4 subsection 4
It’s mostly a bunch of feeling over what sounds right. Like big red rubber ball sounds infinitely better than rubber red big ball.
I draw the line at “on accident” though.
I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. “On accident”, fuck me. “I could care less”, too.
We got a governing body that decides what is correct or not when it comes to our two written languages, bokmål and nynorsk. They do not control speach and what is “correct” to say. I recent years the younger generations (I’m millenial, so not young any more 😢) have began merging two sounds, the sj- /∫/ og kj-sounds /ç/ with only the sj-sound. They can’t even hear the diference. This results in funny situations for us who can hear and pronounce the different sounds when used in words.
Kjede, pronounced with /ç/ at the start, means chain (can be used to describe various types of chains).
Sjede, pronounced with /∫/ at the start, means vagina.
The younger generation pronounced both words with /∫/ at the start. This makes the word “kjedekollisjon” not mean “chain collision” any more, but “vagina collision”. “Halskjede” with a /∫/, suddenly means “neck vagina”, not “necklace”. And so on. Language is fun.
I think it’s precisely because there is no governing body for English and all the rules are colloquial, developed through usage, that people do get grumpy! They are the only ones who can create and enforce the rules! Each English speaker feels personally responsible and compelled to correct use they perceive is in violation of the rules the way they want them to be. If they don’t do it right then and there, no one else can.
We are English speaking and as someone raising a kid it’s really difficult at their age to teach and explain all the words that are spelled the same but can sound different. She loves to learn so I try my best. I wrote a sentence down that she likes to show people and read to them just to start but always asks why it is the way it is.
“My daughter liked when I read her a book the other day so I make it a habit to read 1 book a day with her”
That’s the sentence she’s practicing. There is a lot more to get through though.
Along the same lines, through, thorough, throw, tough, thought, though. Just the slightest variation of spelling. English makes no sense.
German here, we have the exact same issue. It’s driving me crazy.
German: I hate that we use comma as a decimal separator. Makes working with international documents a hassle, my numpad on pc makes a comma so I cannot even type a date…we like to complain about us imperial units as much as anyone but our comma is almost as stupid!
The funny thing is, that most of the world uses commas as decimal separator and comma is the preferred decimal separator by ISO. But instead, in English speaking countries, the period is used as the decimal separator. Actually it comes from the original decimal separator, that was used in the British Empire called
⟨·⟩. When they were changing units to metric, ISO didn’t recognize interpunct as a decimal separator, because it was too similar to the multiplication sign used in other countries. So after some debate in the UK, they’ve adopted the period, because the US was already using it. From the British Empire, South Africa instead adopted the comma.
I did not know that. Very interesting, thanks. Not so fun fact: Switzerland, although German speaking, does not use the comma. Also their keyboard Layout is all over the place with German French and Italian influences.
Not my native language, but the one I speak the most is (American) English.
So many homophones-words that sound the same but are different in meaning or spelling such as knight/night, altar/alter, ail/ale, isle/aisle/I’ll.
Also homographs-words with same spelling but different meaning and/or pronunciation like minute, bass, capital, wind, moped.
So confusing for people trying to learn English and also for people that actually speak it
I can’t speak for all native English speakers, but in my experience we’re very accepting of imperfect grammar from non-native speakers because we know how crazy this language is.
Tanks!
English person: “What’s your name?”
Norwegian person: “Knut”
English person: “Nnuut?”
Norwegian person: “Kno 😢”
https://youtu.be/j53z6RfFb7U?t=28
I hain’t a helk, I’m a g-nu!
Capital is always pronounced the same, but the similar word capitol is a homophone in most accents.
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Inconsistent sounds for the same spelling, as in: tough, cough, through, thorough, bough, dough.
All those stupid English place names: Cholmondeley, Leicester, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire.
Or how about all the words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations.
- Invalid - The data is invalid.
- Invalid - The old man is an invalid.
- Content - I’m content with my lot in life.
- Content - The website’s content is full of ads.
etc.
Old joke. You can tell a contractor from a chemist based on how they pronounce ‘unionized.’
I actually have a list somewhere of all these that I have come across and remembered to write down, sort of a game I play I guess. I haven’t tried to sit down and find all the possible examples of this (that’d be no fun), just stumble across them over time. Anyway the list is longer than you would expect, and now I have to add Invalid!
Yeah, there are tons of these.
Don’t forget Towcester! I find it very funny that there’s a town called Toaster.
Loughborough!
I speak Spanish and being 100% honest about it i love it, the only shitty thing is the fact that the dialects vary a lot (also i kinda hate the tilde).
coño!
I live in the north of Mexico, sometimes when I speak with people from the center I need to look up words that they use
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