Comment on It's amazing so many people are able to use English as a second language.

• pragmakist@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Surely the only languages that are not weird are those specifically designed to be widely spoken?

  And no-one wants to speak those!

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Some languages are more weird than others. Like Spanish has a lot of rules that don’t work 100% of the time, but with far fewer exceptions than English.

    It’s up there among the easiest languages to learn from my understanding and a huge number of people around the world do speak it.

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    • wide_eyed_stupid@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I actually think those kinds of mistakes are made more often by native speakers, because they learn it from other people as they’re growing up (including all the mistakes), while non-native speakers learn it correctly (from books and teachers). Same goes for the then/than or they’re/their/there, etc. When you learn it spoken first, and incorrectly, it’s harder to correct those mistakes than to learn it correctly from the start.

      In Dutch, for example, we have loads of people who will say “groter als” (bigger than), which is dead wrong - it should be “groter dan.” This als/dan-mistake is something typical of natives, and I’ve never heard a non-native make this mistake. Same goes for zij/hun. Usually kids just learn incorrectly from their parents. My own parents make those mistakes as well and it took more than a year of my elementary school teacher correcting me every. single. time I made the mistakes, for me to correct them.

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    • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There are languages that are considered isolates, meaning they are spoken and written languages that share no connection to any other known language. Basque is an example for that, spoken in the Northern parts of Spain, but does not share any similarities to Spanish, Portuguese, English or French.

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    • AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Less vs fewer is definitely a mistake made more by native speakers, who may have known the words most of their lives without a defined meaning until later.

      This grammar mistake is one of my pet peeves with online chat, and really seems to be getting worse in the last few years.

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      • slurpyslop@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        it's not a mistake because it's not a real rule

        This isn't an example of how modern English is going to the dogs. Less has been used this way for well over a thousand years—nearly as long as there's been a written English language. But for more than 200 years almost every usage writer and English teacher has declared such use to be wrong. The received rule seems to have originated with the critic Robert Baker, who expressed it not as a law but as a matter of personal preference. Somewhere along the way—it's not clear how—his preference was generalized and elevated to an absolute, inviolable rule.

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      • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Weird Al is not a fan either, if his song Word Crimes is any indication.

        It’s “less” or it’s “fewer”

        Like people who were

        Never raised in a sewer

        I hate these word crimes

        Like I could care less

        That means you do care

        At least a little

        www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc

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