WORLD OF TEXT

Time for a new blog entry and another interesting topic. We often see sentences like “Hey whaz up, how r u”,  but of course everybody knows the correct spelling.

But there are things that not everyone is sure about – although it concerns their native language. And I find this quite interesting/funny. Don’t you have to be “perfect” at your mother language? I can only come up with one example for English. I was chatting with a good friend from the USA and she wrote “seperate” instead of “separate”, and I told her “it’s ‘separate’, with ‘A’”, I was surprised that she didn’t know. To me, it was absolutely clear because in German you say “Separaaat”, you stress the “As”. “As”, that’s a good cue. Germans tend to use an apostrophe + “S” to create the plural for abbreviated/foreign words. For example “CD’s” (this is used A LOT), “DVD’s”. “PC’s”, “Pizza’s”, “Info’s”, … Horrible!

The most common German mistake is – I think – “seit” and “seid”, the former means “since/for”, the latter “are”. So, for example “My friends, you are amazing” becomes “My friends, you since amazing”.

Children tend to use “as” for “than”. Example: “I’m faster than you” -> “I’m faster as you”. But I also hear adults saying “as”. I think there’s no German that has never made this mistake.

Germans often use “einzigste/r/s” for “the only …”, e. g. “He’s the only one in the company who can speak Russian”, in Germany you often hear “the most only”.

Or, another funny mistake is…it’s a bit weird to explain/understand it in English… Instead of “Susan’s brother”, Germans say “The Susan her brother”. We never write it like this, but we always say so, always.

As far as other languages are concerned, I know that French people often use different endings because they all sound equal, for example “je peu/je peut” instead of “je peux” or “vous avez gagnez” for “vous avez gagné”.

I don’t know any other examples for foreign languages, be it English, French, Spanish, Russian, Korean… whatever. So, tell me, what mistakes do people make in your country? I’m curious!!