Something I find really interesting is aspects of language that native speakers struggle with in their *own* language. So, for example, in English, spelling takes a long time to teach because it's so irregular. I'm told in French, kids struggle with the huge number of homophones. Please add!
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Also, 2 native speakers from different regions could struggle to understand each other.
Also occasional struggle with some verb tenses usage.
That's about as far as I got. I already knew Latin, so I could pretend my way through the vocabulary. Putting it all together? Uffa.
And the requisite gesticulations to make your point? Uffa pero.
The "big red house" vs "the red big house".
(I’ll get my coat)
That was briefly how you created the genitive in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_genitive, and influenced the "-'s" genetics form.
My native dialect uses that for businesses. Shop at Meijer's, work at Ford's.
I went to a German school for a year, one classmate was a Russian immigrant who spoke impeccable German. But she once used a wrong gender with some word and the whole class freaked out. 😁
I wonder if this is the same for Portuguese students learning por que/porque/por quê/porque.
Meanwhile a second language student would learn both writing and pronunciation together.
The US is generally & sadly an exception. I got lucky and *was* taught it. Knowing what words do in sentences is a huge help to SOL learning.
Brazilian Portuguese speakers know the rule because we all learn the formal rules in school but we only follow them with conscious effort.
Wikipedia tries to map the colloquial usage of personal pronouns in Brazil against the standard and it's a monster of a page
One tricky thing in English (and every language I have ever studied) is using the "correct" preposition and I think native speakers may have trouble with this and that seems grammatical to me (prepositions with the same semantic sense have different uses).
My theory is that's wrong, everyone makes up their own rules and it approximates to the same.
The million rules were invented by grammarians and linguists investigating the chaos, but declared discoveries of intrinsic rules.
I'm hardly the 1st.
In Spanish as well as in English most errors come from homophones when you just try to write down whatever you *think* you are listening to.
Similarly, in Spanish people wrongly write down "Vamos haber" instead of "Vamos a ver" when again the first construction makes no grammatical sense at all.
When learning English I first learned about grammar, so I'd never write "I could of".
Nobody makes mistakes on which conjugations end with a /t/ sound, many make mistakes on whether it's -d, -t or -dt
https://globalchinapulse.net/character-amnesia-in-china/?utm_source=pocket_shared
Even before the smart phone age I've read reports going back to the 1980s that say Japanese people forget how to write most of the Kanji they learned in schools (still write ~500 out of 1945).
Best with the link, of course 😅
Here's a slightly more official source for that article:
https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
“ough” just sucks
a/à
a/há
porque/por que
trás/traz
afim/a fim
demais/de mais
(or is it "different than"? hmmmm ....)
“Different from” 🇺🇸
“Different to” 🇬🇧
This aplies to other homophones which are accentuated, as como / cómo, solo / sólo, mas / más
In Dutch, word-final -t, d, and -dt sound identical causing many spelling errors in verb conjugation
Confusing 'ij' with 'ei' both of which are pronounced the same. Ik lijd (I suffer) en ik leid (I lead).
Also verb endings on a 't', a 'd', or, a 'dt', all pronounced the same. 'Ik leid', 'hij leidt', 'ik bijt', en 'ik word geleid'. The endings all sound like a 't'.
In high school, I was taught never to end a sentence with a preposition. Today, it's okay and has a name.
"Mas" e "mais" has been a sérios problema, but it is because a lot of people doesn't care for being well educated.
Also: there, their and they're.
Also forming the plural (for non-mass nouns). Good that we standardized so almost all plurals are just +"s" (we should get rid of the last few Germanic plurals like geese).
Also the possessive (to me at least +"'s" seems like forming the possessive).
Whereas my impression is there are truly caseless languages without even such vestiges.
trying to think of an example where it should end in 't' but people write 'd' but i think people get that wrong a lot less often
In hearing people this is because spoken language generally lacks this feature, while for deaf children it is because they lack the life experience to use it.
To avoid confusion many call it Salop, although half of Shropshire pronounce it Solap😂😂😂
Shrewsbury 🤫🤫🤫🤫
Walt Whitman’s poem has the famous line ‘do I contradict myself? Very well…I am large, I contain multitudes’. Plurality, yet singular grammar.