What mistakes do people often make when learning your country’s language?

13 comments

1. German here. One of the most common mistakes that takes people a long time to fix is the differentiation between formal address “Sie” vs. talking about a group of people or something “sie”. It’s highly contextual when spoken because you have no visual of capital S vs s, so it takes a lot of vocabulary and understanding of the context until that works for most people.

2. One of the mistakes is being afraid of language purists and not practicing your speech in real life because of that. There’s been an illusion that all of the Ukrainian speakers will humiliate you for the mistakes, but actually they genuinely want to help you. Imperfect language is nothing to be ashamed of, and people will appreciate the effort anyways

3. Not learning how to use the proper swear words 😂

   IT is wonderful for swearing ad it’s mix and match. I’m trying to teach a few chosen words to some friends and they just can’t get them straight

4. Use Google Translate when my language is literally one of the hardest in the world.

5. Not trying to learn the language at all. Or presuming the language of The Netherlands is English. In general people appreciate if you at least try to learn the language.

   That being said, most foreigners find it difficult to pronounce word in Dutch. Especially the g sound. And people having difficulties in using the right conjugation.

6. Pitch-accent, because it has no signage in written form that would help identifying it, so it’s difficult to learn the correct pronunciation for non-natives. No matter how generous the language actually is due to the different dialects and their own different pitch-accents, the foreigners always choose a non-existing one and sound like robots.

7. Excessively worrying about grammar and accent. Just muck in and talk! We’ll figure out the rest of it.

   There isn’t really any “correct” accent in English and having an accent from your first language just adds to who you are. Trying to erase it just seems a bit extreme and you can’t speak English with no accent – the concept doesn’t really exist.

   The most common mistakes I hear are usually with prepositions or direct translation / false friends.

8. I think the mistakes people make depend a lot on their first language. You automatically tend to convert phrases or grammar rules from your own language into the new.

   When I lived in Asia for a while, first communicating in english and then learning Thai and Khmer, i had so many situations where I though “Ah yes! Thats why they say it like this in english.”

   For example thai people often, when you ask for a certain thing, they often answer with “No have/have” because thats exactly what they would say in thai “Mai dai/dai” .

   On the other hand germans often say, when asking for the bill “can i pay?”. Or telling others that they take care of the bill “You are invited”. You wouldn’t say that in english, but it’s a direct translation of what you would say in german.

   If your language has only one article, like “the”, the 5 articles in spanish might confuse you. If your language has no times, like Thai, you might get those wrong and if your language isn’t very gendered you might have trouble with learning the right genders in a highly gendered language like german.

9. I proofread a lot of draft papers written by non-native speakers of English (especially French/Spanish native speakers) and these are the most common mistakes I tend to have to correct (albeit not usually as extreme as these examples):

   – Adverb placement: E.g. “I speak very well English” or “He is all the time laughing”.

   – When to use the possessive instead of “of”: E.g. “the chocolate’s box” instead of “the box of chocolates”.

   – When to use the, a, or no article at all. Speakers of Indian and Slavic languages have particular trouble with this as articles don’t exist in their languages, but even in languages where they *do* exist, they’re not usually used in the same way as in English

   – “He discussed about this topic”

   – Using phrases like “allows to” intransitively, e.g. “Our results allow to understand better this problem”

10. Genders, when is a noun male or female, and stuff like that.

11. Here are things I do badly in Swedish (native English speaker, advanced in Swedish).

    Word order for adverbs changes in subordinate clauses when there is an adverb. Normally it goes after the verb but in subordinate clauses, it comes before. I am very bad at this. In the sentence below “vill” is the verb and “inte” is the adverb.

    Main clause: Han vill inte komma i morgon.
    Subclause: Han säger att han inte vill komma i morgon.

    Adjectives need to agree with the gender and the number of objects they describe. When speaking or writing I get sloppy with en/ett words.

    En fin dag
    Ett fint hus
    Flera fina katter

    Pronunciation and melody. Swedish has a very distinct melody it is very difficult to nail down. There is also a ton of vowel sounds that are much more distinct than in English. For native English speakers, we have a tendency to collapse and slur all vowel sounds together.

    There are some other things but those are the ones off the top of my head.

12. The main mistakes are typically
    – word order (Dutch word order may seem random, until you do it wrong)
    – de/het article mistake. Dutch has three genders, but only two articles: one for gendered words and one for neuter words (similar to Scandinavian languages). Using the wrong one is a common mistake.
    – not finishing off a verb. In Dutch, soms verbs just can’t exist on its own. In English you can say “I understand” but in Dutch “Ik begrijp” is incomplete, because it missed exactly the thing the verb specifies. “Ik begrijp het” would be better.
    – incorrect conjugation of adjectives

13. All of them. You would have to live here for several decades to not make even basic mistakes.