A lot of it is just level of attention and effort…
A native speaker isn’t going to give a fuck, or even read their comment/post for sending it. Lots of their mistakes involve autocorrect
Someone who is nervous about how good their English is, will review and catch stuff and fix it.
They’re putting time and effort, and still feeling self-conscious.
Which is why we’ll see an absolutely perfect English comment followed by: Sorry for my terrible English, I hope that made sense! When it’s written at a higher grade level than our newspapers are.
Like think of speaking English as golf. Someone whose been playing their whole lives, but never actually took lessons versus someone who started last year, but has been working hard and taking lessons.
They may get the same score, but it’s hard to say they’re equal. One is actively trying to improve, and will soon and eventually surpass the “natural”.
“only” English has problems with homophones, apostrophe placement, and using slang where it’s not appropriate
Someone whose been playing their whole lives
I believe this means you learned English first! Haha
Same is true about second language French speakers. French conjugates articles (or most things, really, the language is extremely gendered) with nouns. E.g. “the father and the mother” would be “le père et la mère” (le/la is the same definite article in masculine/feminine form, it has no neutral form). English speakers get rightfully confused. It gets even more confusing as there’s a clear trend in the language where many feminine gendered words end with an E (porte/door, table/table, arme/weapon), but not always (nuage/cloud, véhicule/vehicle).
In what sense? If anything, the very concept of “everything is gendered” makes it sit at one extreme of the spectrum of languages, in the very literal sense of the word, wouldn’t you agree?
In Europe without even anything exotic - German, archaic Dutch and all insular Scandinavian languages, and all Slavic languages. I don’t know Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, so I can’t talk about them, a plethora of cases, but genders - I don’t remember.
The interesting thing to learn is that there are languages with more than 3 genders (M, F and thing). Or even more than 4 (M, F, N and thing), with additional genders being for kinds of animals, fish, plants, buildings, instruments. But I’ve only heard about that, haven’t studied any such language.
Interesting with that overly formal tone. Might be due to how school english focuses on correct grammar and vocab, but not necessarily how people actually speak casually. At least that’s how I remember English in high school.
“second language” English has problems with articles, unusual plurals, irregular verbs, and tends to an overly formal tone
“only” English has problems with homophones, apostrophe placement, and using slang where it’s not appropriate
A lot of it is just level of attention and effort…
A native speaker isn’t going to give a fuck, or even read their comment/post for sending it. Lots of their mistakes involve autocorrect
Someone who is nervous about how good their English is, will review and catch stuff and fix it.
They’re putting time and effort, and still feeling self-conscious.
Which is why we’ll see an absolutely perfect English comment followed by: Sorry for my terrible English, I hope that made sense! When it’s written at a higher grade level than our newspapers are.
Like think of speaking English as golf. Someone whose been playing their whole lives, but never actually took lessons versus someone who started last year, but has been working hard and taking lessons.
They may get the same score, but it’s hard to say they’re equal. One is actively trying to improve, and will soon and eventually surpass the “natural”.
I believe this means you learned English first! Haha
Same is true about second language French speakers. French conjugates articles (or most things, really, the language is extremely gendered) with nouns. E.g. “the father and the mother” would be “le père et la mère” (le/la is the same definite article in masculine/feminine form, it has no neutral form). English speakers get rightfully confused. It gets even more confusing as there’s a clear trend in the language where many feminine gendered words end with an E (porte/door, table/table, arme/weapon), but not always (nuage/cloud, véhicule/vehicle).
Compared to English - yeah, but in general there’s nothing extreme about genders in French.
In what sense? If anything, the very concept of “everything is gendered” makes it sit at one extreme of the spectrum of languages, in the very literal sense of the word, wouldn’t you agree?
It has only 2 genders, and they don’t affect verb inflections.
Are there languages with more than 2 genders? That sounds interesting.
In Europe without even anything exotic - German, archaic Dutch and all insular Scandinavian languages, and all Slavic languages. I don’t know Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, so I can’t talk about them, a plethora of cases, but genders - I don’t remember.
The interesting thing to learn is that there are languages with more than 3 genders (M, F and thing). Or even more than 4 (M, F, N and thing), with additional genders being for kinds of animals, fish, plants, buildings, instruments. But I’ve only heard about that, haven’t studied any such language.
I was right! It was interesting. Thanks for the reply.
Interesting with that overly formal tone. Might be due to how school english focuses on correct grammar and vocab, but not necessarily how people actually speak casually. At least that’s how I remember English in high school.
Nonnative: I definitely unable to come.
Native: I am definately unable to come.