Showing True Colors [LWN.net]

Showing True Colors

Posted Dec 27, 2011 5:29 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Showing True Colors by jmalcolm
Parent article: The "White Label Office" release candidate

Won't work :)

Non-native English speakers rarely make these kinds of mistakes, mostly because we've learned the English grammar consciously. Besides, most of us are more accustomed to written English rather than spoken English.

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Showing True Colors

Posted Dec 27, 2011 11:55 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (2 responses)

Quite so. There are distinctive mistakes that non-native speakers of English tend to make, depending on their native language (too many articles; no articles; getting "fun" and "funny" mixed up), but homophone foulups aren't one of them.

Showing True Colors

Posted Dec 29, 2011 22:13 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] (1 responses)

There are distinctive mistakes that non-native speakers of English tend to make, depending on their native language (too many articles; no articles; getting "fun" and "funny" mixed up), but homophone foulups aren't one of them.

That's not true in my experience, though the counterexamples have usually involved Asian speakers. Some of the "typos" are only approximate homonyms (and I wish I could remember an example, because some have been quite amusing).

Never having asked, it's not clear to me whether the speakers were simply typing on autopilot (which is how I make such errors) or if they had actually never seen/understood the proper word in the first place. My vague recollection is that most cases have involved idiomatic phrases (probably heard rather than read), so logic doesn't necessarily provide much guidance on what's correct.

Greg

OT: ESOL

Posted Jan 13, 2012 21:30 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

My particular least favorite non-primary-language usage item is the tendency of (I think primarily) German-speakers -- I assume it's based on that language's grammar -- to say "since $DURATION", as opposed to the English-standard "since $TIMESTAMP"; you might hear "since a couple weeks" instead of "since last month".

Since it's often the case that this sounds like a simple missing "ago", I tend to have Garden Path Syndrome reactions to it, waiting for that "ago" while I barge forwards into an entire new sentence.