What words in your language Look or Sound so similar that you keep mixing them up?

8 comments

1. In Ukrainian I mix скільки [skil’ky] (how much?/how many?/as much as) стільки [stil’ky] (that much).

2. In third grade, a girl in my class wrote *Nachtbar — night bar* instead of *Nachbar – neighbour* on the blackboard. Fortunately her cursive handwriting was nice. Otherwise we could have read *Nacktbar — naked bar* as well.

3. I think there’s only about two pairs that I really have to think about because in both cases either variant is commonly used in language. One is ligt (lies, as in he lies in bed) vs licht (light). That’s the only g/ch one I can think of right now, there’s not a lot of those.

   The other one is zei (said) vs zij (she/side). IJ and ei are digraphs that used to be pronounced differently but are these days pronounced the same in Standard Dutch. So now there’s quite a number of words that have versions in either and you can’t distinguish them by ear in Standard Dutch, though you can in many dialects since a bunch of those retained the old ij pronounciations. But they’re definitely spelled differently and if you use the wrong one it can mean something completely different. Aside from the one I mentioned there’s also things like leid/lijd (lead vs suffer), mei/mij (May/me), hei/hij (heath/he), meid/mijd (girl/avoid), wei/wij (meadow/we), peil/pijl (gauge/arrow) and loads more. But most those don’t tend to cause a lot of issues in daily life since in most situations one is used way more often than the other or they’re both uncommon.

4. – “das” and “dass” (the/that, as in “I think that mosquitos suck”)
   – “seit” and “seid” (since/are, as in “you ((plural)) are”)

5. I can’t think of any, for Finnish.

   English is a bit of a mess when it comes to pronunciation vs the actual letters used in words. Or vice versa. It’s a mix of Germanic and Romance words, with some Celtic thrown in, with Greek and others on top. And sauna. (not “saw-na”)

   Finnish, and many other languages, like Italian, are mostly “what you see is how you say it”. English is none of that.

6. One word-pair I constantly confuse in German is “Standard” and “Standart”. “Standard” has the same meaning as its English counterpart, “Standart” means “the way something stands”. And to make it extra confusing, there’s also “Standarte”, which is an old, military flag (which, confusingly, in English is called “standard”). So… yeah.

   Some people also confuse “Grad” (degree) with “Grat” (ridge, crest) and “das” (definite article) with “dass” (relative pronoun). Many children confuse “ist” (is) with “isst” (eats) and “ass” (ate) with “aas” (rotting carcass). The last one is particularly confusing here in Switzerland because we don’t use the ß-letter (in Germany, “ass” would be spelled “aß”).

   This last one is more of a dialect-thing but it’s still fun to point out. In the Zurich-dialect of Swiss, “hät” means “has” (indicative form) whereas “het” means “would have” (conditional form). In the Bern-dialect, it’s exactly the other way around, “het” is the indicative form while “hät” is the conditional form. This can easily lead to misunderstandings when someone from Bern talks to someone from Zurich.

7. We have words that are written the same but accented differently, eg. klop (tick or bench), je (is or (he’s) eating), peška (fruit pit or female pedestrian)… but you know how to accent them by context. You’d have to be stupid not to know.

8. Personally,nothing.I hope!

   There are some words that foreigners and students of Italian often pronounce wrongly,changing the meaning.But its rare to hear an Italian do so,in my experience.

   I think the most common type are maybe those with single and double consonants.This changes the pronunciation and also the meaning,and it can be quite funny to hear sometimes.

   For example ‘penne’ is a type of pasta,feathers or pens…while ‘pene’ means penis.

   Then there are words where people might get the gender wrong,and again that changes the meaning…I have heard Italians doing that,from time to time.

   For example,’il baro’ means the cheat whereas ‘la bara’ means the coffin.