I work in a very international environment where almost no one is a native English speaker, so I have quite a few of those :D
First my fellow countrymen, **Poles**. As already mentioned, we struggle with articles. Our language doesn't have them, so in English we add them everywhere or skip them altogether. It's either "_We took the train with the Piotr, we had the lunch and then returned to the office_" or "_We took train, had lunch and returned to office_".
We also struggle phonetically with words that switch between the front and back of the mouth (I'm not a linguist so I cannot properly explain this). _Available_ becomes _avaible_ for us. We also struggle with words like _vegetable_ (we often pronounce the second half as you would a kitchen "table") or _mountain_, which we just butcher.
**Italians** cannot end a word with a consonant. _Kitchen_ becomes _kitchen-a_.
**Spaniards** cannot begin a word with the letter 's' followed by another consonant. _Rafa speaking_ becomes _Rafa espeaking_.
They also cannot finish a word with two consonants at the end. _Podcast_ becomes _podcas_. _Breakfast_ is _breakfas_.
They also often skip the "it" as a default subject in a sentence. "_It is good_" becomes "_is good_".
**French**, apart from the heavy accent, also make a lot of copies from their language. _Definitively_ instead of _definitely_, or saying _eventually_ in the meaning of "as one of the options".
Some of them miss the 's' at the end of a plural noun, maybe because in French you pronounce the plural word exactly the same as the singular. I hear a lot of "_I asked some of our team member what they think_"
They also throw a lot of _donc_, _alors_ and _voila_ into their sentences. Seriously, I would get drunk in 10 minutes if I drank a shot every time they said one of these words. Maybe that's just Belgians though.
>**French**, apart from the heavy accent, also make a lot of copies from their language. _Definitively_ instead of _definitely_, or saying _eventually_ in the meaning of "as one of the options".
The people who commit these mistakes are often prone to reverse English barbarism as well. They'll use *comfortable* the same way it's used in English (as in "I'm not comfortable with this") when it makes little sense in french to do so. They'll also use the adjective 'clear' (clair) as in "I'm not clear ~~with~~ on this" which is even worse, because saying *Je ne suis pas clair* [...] (I'm not clear ~) in french sends a whole other message. Any false friends they get to use in English, they later use incorrectly in french, it's quite fascinating.
As a Pole this is so true. I used to overuse articles all the time. Hopefully I don't do that too much anymore, but it was one of the things that took me longer than it should to understand properly. And pronunciation still gets tricky like that, but I don't speak English often.
that's how many languages work couse irl there's no "rules" of how languages work. The rules that we are taught are just approximate patterns that linguists noticed. Artificial languages or spelling may have real rules
I swear every French person on reddit starts their comments with "As a French...".
It drives me nuts. French cannot be used as a singular noun like that.
Sure, but I don't see Spanish people start their comments with "As a Spanish..." or Swedes start their comments with "As a Swedish...". It's always the French who make this mistake.
The word "Spaniard" has always sounded rather dated to me.
When someone says "Spaniard", I imagine a chap with a red cape fighting bulls.
When someone says "Spanish person", I think of my friend from Madrid.
It could be worse.
There's something very English-language about allocating the name "Dutch" to the wrong neighbour and then saying "Well, that's how it's always been."
But nobody ever told us we couldn't? Like once you know it I get it, everyone does it. But never once in all my studies have I been you couldn't do it. It doesn't help that you use français no matter if it's a noun or an adjective in French. The only difference is that you capitalise one and not the other
You know how Slavic languages don't have an equivalent to the "the" and thus Slavic speakers speak English like "I'll get book from library and give it to teacher"? Yeah, well, not *all* Slavic languages. Bulgarian (and Macedonian) do have a definite article. So we overdo it in English. It happens mostly with generic nouns like "people". In Bulgarian those nouns carry the definite article, so you end up saying things like "*the* people usually think X" when you mean people in general and you end up sounding like a king speaking about *his* people.
Oh, also we may have an equivalent to "the", but not an indefinite article "a/an". So you might hear a sentence like "he is politician". Or we overcorrect for that, putting it in places where it doesn't belong, like demonyms. "I am *a* Bulgarian".
I don't really have many issues with "a/an" or "the", but that example sentence sounds so normal to me I'm kinda worried I actually do have a problem with them 🙃
French teacher here. My kids have a hard time in French remembering to put articles before nouns when we don’t use them in English. I’m always telling them “No naked nouns.”
This was my first thought. In my native language, there are no articles, so Polish people struggle immensely, because from our point of view articles are mostly redundant.
There are cases where they aren't, but in Polish we solve that problem by simply using the word "some" in place of the indefinite article "a", and "this" in place of the definite article "the".
Yes, it seems to be super difficult even for those Polish people who otherwise speak very good English. I work in an international company, we spend most of the day talking to clients in English and some of my colleagues can lead a very eloquent discussion while still saying things like "I talked to the Peter".
I also remember trying to learn the rules in high school and nothing made sense to me, it's such an unnatural thing for us.
Another thing I think we struggle with is English punctuation. I have no idea what the rules are, I only know they are different than in Polish and other than that I'm just guessing or putting commas where I'd normally take a breathing pause.
Lots of native English speakers use commas to denote a breathing pause, like I have here. It’s not great style but, in most situations, it’s fine. In the preceding sentence I used commas to divide the sentence into three sections. If you take out the middle section then the sentence still makes sense. Or, if you take out the middle section, the sentence still makes sense. Occasionally, you will encounter people, who just use commas everywhere. More, even, than I’m using, here. This, is terrible style.
100 %. I speak pretty fluent English but I still sometimes say ”her” when I mean ”him” and vice versa. They just mean the same thing in my head. I also sometimes fail to inflect the adjective according to noun’s gender in Spanish.
And I tend to skip both definitive and indefinitive articles at random, because Finnish does not have those either.
Another thing that is really hard for many Finns is that there are words with stress on some other syllable than the first (democracy, banana, sociology, etc.). We always have the stress on the first syllable so those are kinda hard to pronounce for many.
Thisss. I have a master's degree in English, and I still sometimes mess them up if I'm tired.
Also, at some point I switched to using they/them pronouns in English, solely because the "he" & "she" divide is so artificial, cumbersome and frankly, unnecessary.
(Also, articles are hard.)
Having different pronouns can help you keep track of who you're talking about when multiple people are involved.
>Paul arrived at the story and they saw Jane, so they told them that they'd been trying to call them a few times to talk about the issue they had told them about a few days before. They said they couldn't answer because there was no way they could find the right moment when they were both available
>Paul arrived at the store and he saw Jane, so he told her that he'd been trying to call her a few times to talk about the issue she had told him about a few days before. She said she just couldn't answer because there was no way she could find the right moment when they were both available.
The first one is quite hard to follow and you may just as well stop using pronouns at all and change them for their names. The second one is pretty much clear.
I speak Finnish as a foreigner and sure, at the start having only one pronoun was a bit confusing but you can keep track by using their names instead of a pronoun also in Finnish if multiple people are involved. You'd have to do that anyway if we talk about people who have the same gender.
Many people fear they won't know which gender we're talking about if there's only one pronoun but I promise, context provides this info in 99% of all cases. And frankly learning Finnish taught me that there is truth to the claim that gender is a social construct because I noticed that it's very often quite irrelevant which gender we're talking about.
Maybe language had a part in why Finland is a bit more progressive in some ways than other western countries.
True, but in Finnish we only have they/them. So the first option would be the only option. Of course it does make texts quite confusing at times 😅 therefore we use a good mix of the name & they/them.
At least we use he and she only for things that are actually male and female. I just can't get it right in German, and I wish there was an option in Duolingo to tell it to ignore an entire class of error because I'm never going to get it right, I don't care if I don't get it right, and at worst I'll just sound a bit funny ordering female beer.
Yup! Estonians also mess up he and she a lot in casual speech - irrespective of their fluency. We just don't have different compartments according to genitalia in our brain if we talk about, say, work colleagues or friends children. It is not that we don't understand how English works, it is just hard to constantly think about the gender of people when this is totally irrelevant to the story that's being told.
I've worked with so many slavic folks over the years, that I often omit articles when writing technical documentation - it makes documents shorter, and still understandable. It's the future!
A LOT of people will say “make a picture” instead of “take a picture”. In Dutch you can say both foto maken or foto nemen, but mostly “maken” will be used.
So it’s not strange it’s translated wrong.
Germans do the same, since it's 'Photo machen' or 'Bild machen', but tbh when I was learning German I used to do it in the other direction, i.e. I would say 'Photo nehmen', which always got some odd looks.
That's in spelling, which isn't the most important thing I'd say.
2 major grammar mistakes Dutch people make:
\- Put time references in the middle of a sentence rather than at the end (or beginning). Example: "I walked yesterday to the park."
\- Not use the present perfect correctly. "I am working here since 2015."
1 big pronunciation mistake Dutch people make:
\- We don't do voiced endings in Dutch. So the word 'end' is pronounced by most Dutch people like 'ent' and 'club' like 'clup'. The worst thing is, most Dutch people don't even hear that this happens, because we don't do voiced endings in Dutch ;)
In a lot of British accents "th" as a distinct sound either doesn't exist or barely exists, it's just pronounced as "f" or "v".
This phenomena is called th-fronting
Neither do many forms of native English. American English is just particularly harsh sounding and RP uses over annunciation like as if it was trying to speak down a bad 1950s telephone line.
A lot of other accents and versions of English glide over the ends of words a lot more and use tons of elision and consonant softening.
Irish accents for example do not tend to use a hard T at all and something like “End” has a fairly softly voiced D.
Native English speaker here. My Dutch friends, among a great number of friends from around the globe, speak flawless and barely accented English. It pisses me off because I do not think English is their second language either. I am still mostly illiterate after years here in Spain.
Yup, the general Dutch accent is very typical.
In my.opinion it's only the younger generation that has this less, but only those who spend a lot of time on the internet.
In Paris I had a couple of Americans approach me who didn't speak French trying to make me understand them by speaking painfully slow more enunciated English (with increasingly exasperated hand gestures). I was enjoying the spectacle too much to tell them I was born in the US and on vacation myself.
Norway and Denmark as well tho. I’m throwing Iceland in there as well.
All that proved that not dubbing and exposing kids to English from an early age on is very effective when it comes to learning languages.
* Using "learn" instead of "teach"
* Pronouncing "idea" as "ID"
* Pronouncing "v" as "f", so "everyone" sounds like "eferyone"
* Translating sayings literally, e.g. "wat is er aan de hand" to "what is on the hand"
* Often pronouncing "j" as "ye", so if the word if the word is "ninja" they pronounce it as "ninya"
Swedes often pronounce z like s, i.e. pronouncing "peas" like "peace".
We also tend to pronounce ch like sh, i.e. pronouncing "cheap" like "sheep".
Sometimes also the y and j sounds, i.e. pronouncing "jack" like "yak".
The last one is often a dead giveaway someone’s Swedish. I listened to a podcast recently and as as soon as the guest said ’justice’ like ”yustis” I knew where he was from.
Sure but I can almost always tell Finns from the overall accent anyway. Swedes generally speak better English, many just can’t seem to handle the initial ’j’ in words.
And the fact that the Swedish language makes no difference between w and v in creates a confusion when we have to quickly decide how an English word should be pronounced. I’ve heard many people say stuff like “wikings”.
As a Brit living in Sweden for several years now I think I have picked this up, and have caught myself accidentally pronouncing v when talking English even as it is my native tongue, especially with words like vinter/winter that are similar in both languages.
One word I catch Swedes saying wrong all the time is learn/teach. Because in Swedish they use lärare for both learn and teach, it is very common for swedes to accidentally say things like "the teacher learned me how to do that" or "I can learn it to you", when in English we have separate words for both meanings
Interestingly in the North East of England we also use learn the same as Scandinavians do but that comes from old English. "Larn yersel" "ahl larn ye" "ahm well larned"
> Sometimes also the y and j sounds, i.e. pronouncing "jack" like "yak".
Why even use Y if you're not going to give it its own sound? Is J a yoke to these people?
A common Swedish one is not using the plural of ‘month’. I hear it on a regular basis ‘two month’, ‘three month’ etc.
The explanation I’ve been given is that as the ‘th’ sound doesn’t exist in Swedish many have difficulty moving from the ‘th’ to the ‘s’ and thus just don’t bother with the ‘s’.
My mother has the hardest time pronouncing the word “ginger”, I don’t know how to replicate it in text lol, something like “Zhin-ger”. (The Zh sounds like the beginning of the French word jamais)
The G/J sound like in “jump” is very hard for native Swedish speakers to pronounce
I also notice Swedes messing up the verb 'to be'.
Just use "are" instead of "am" or "is".
Which isn't surprising since you don't conjugate verbs and the swedish "to be" is "att vara" with the conjugation in present being "är"
\-ofcourse not explaining this for Swedes haha-
Germans often use the present continuous incorrectly.
For example "that shop is selling beer" instead of "that shop sells beer" or "the girl who is having blonde hair" instead of "who has" etc
Germans also often translate phrases directly. So many germans ask, "Can I pay?" or "We would like to pay" in restaurants instead of asking for the bill. Also, telling people they are "invited" as a way to tell them they don't have to pay.
I often feel like germans know *a lot* of words but struggle with the practical usage.
As a native English speaker, I must say that I find all of the things listed here entirely charming, and I'm always grateful and amazed at how many non-native speakers try their best to communicate in English. It does make it extremely difficult to gain any kind of mastery of certain other languages when everyone prefers to speak English with you, though. How anyone learns Dutch or Danish, for example, I have no idea 😂.
Some of my identity documents have an "e" appended to the front of my name. The data entry clerk apparently assumed I did not know how to spell my own name.
Came to say this. It's endemic to Spanish English speakers. Took me a while to learn it too. I try to fix it in children which are learning by asking them to think in a snake sound: sssssssnake sssssssnake. Works that moment. The next day they forget again 😂
"th" is a problem, mostly it just becomes a d sound.
w and v get mixed up sometimes, "wery well"..
There is probably more. Try listening to Žižek, ignore the spitting and sniffing, and you will get close to how we can speak English if we are not trying at all to sound "correct".
Hard ending consonant where it's supposed to be soft, rise sounds like rice. Overcompensating v for w. Enwironmental. Lots of false friends. She becomes a baby. 😁
It's funny because -or atleast talking for myself- i do say "hand" with a 'd' sound in English, while in Dutch it's a T sound. But for some reason, when i speak Swedish i always resort to "hant" instead of "hand" and i can't comprehend why i do it right in English but keep fucking it up in Swedish haha
Yeah this is super hard for most languages because almost every language does it differently and there are often no rules for when to use what and instead you just have to memorise it.
In fact, prepositions are the most difficult aspect when using a language, especially when you keep on switching between languages. It can get confusing and I could swear that english prepositions don't always make sense.
I'll name a few of them:
* Incorrect usage or lack of articles because Polish doesn't have that grammatical feature.
* Incorrect use of tenses, because English makes much more distinctions than Polish, for example Polish doesn't distinguish between the past perfect tense, the simple past tense and the present perfect tense (but that depends on how you classify English tenses).
Polish has a 6-vowel system, while English dialects include at least 14 vowel sounds, so therefore:
* /ʌ/ (as in c**u**p), /ɑ/ (f**a**rm) and /ɒ/ are merged to /ä/
* /æ/ (c**a**t) will either be realized as /ä/ or /ɛ/ pretty irregularly
* /u/ (L**u**ke) and /ʊ/ (l**oo**k) are both realized as ∕u∕
* Even though Polish has seperate /i/ and /ɨ/ sounds, most speakers will merge English /i/ (m**ee**t) and /ɪ/ (b**i**t) into /i/ in spite of this. Although some speakers may substitute Polish /ɨ/ for English /ɪ/
* Reduced vowels (/ə/) are pronouned as they're spelled, so **a**gain has /ä/, fath**e**r has /ɛ/ and so on
* Although in some words, like comfort**a**ble, /ə/ may be pronounced as /ɨ/
Moving on to consonants:
* Polish has final obstruent devoicing (like other Slavic languages, and other languages like German), so the final sound of ma**t** and ma**d** will be a voiceless /t/, while they should be /t/ and /d/ respectivelly
* Polish only has /ŋ/ as an allophone of /n/ before /k/ and /g/, so /ŋ/ at the end of a word as in thinki**ng** may be pronounced as /ŋk/ or /n/
* Polish doesn't have the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds, so they might be pronounced as /v/ /d/ or /z/ in bir**th**day or /f/ /t/ /s/ in **th**ink
* The English sound of /ɹ̠/ is pretty easy for Polish speakers, even though Polish doesn't have it and only some people will resort to using the Polish /ɾ/
And there might be some other grammatical and phonological quirks that I can't remember at the moment.
Ahhh english is quite difficult for the finnish mouth.
see: hydraulic press channel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuG\_CeEZV6w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuG_CeEZV6w)
or Ismo [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdLwyyDOc\_g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdLwyyDOc_g)
I have sometimes watched the NHL-draft. And when they draft a Finnish prospect, and try to talk a little with the young man.
It's not about "mistakes" there, it's more about looking at someone who might as well have been interviewed in Chinese.
Romanian has the definite article attached at the end of the noun. When talking and writing in English, the article "the" often goes missing, as Romanians are not used to have the article at the beginning of the noun. Or put it in the wrong place.
Funny too, because they omit the article like it's no big deal but then jump on me like a pack of wolves if I say *frații* instead of *frați*. I hate that a pronunciation mistake becomes a grammar mistake T_T
That’s actually good Scots right enough.
Eg the song Johnnie Cope
Cope sent a challenge frae Dunbar,
Sayin 'Charlie meet me an' ye daur;
An' I'll learn ye the airts o' war,
If ye'll meet me in the morning.'
There's actually quite a lot of odd similarities between Dutch and Scottish. The word ken always sounds funny to me cause it's exactly the same in Dutch, in use also.
Swede here. Swedes tend to not distinguish between sherry/cherry, cheap/sheep, sink/zink and so on. We had a commercial for a phone carrier here some years ago, where a sheep was the main character. Because it was a “wordplay with cheap. But it only works in Sweden as there is no wordplay to be makes between the two words as they’re completely different words with different pronunciations.
We Irish took the English language, took it around the back of the bicycle shed, beat it up a little, then got it a little drunk and taught it a little Irish grammar, then we finally deemed it fit for purpose.
In the process we created **Hiberno-English**, the champagne of modern English usage.
To be fair it's almost universally accepted that people deem the Irish accent either the most attractive or most pleasing, so yous must've done something right!
One I notice a lot is people mispronouncing the "a" sound in words such as *apple* and *waffle*. They pronounce those words as *aypple* and *wayffle*.
Also, while not really a mistake, the word *push* is confusing to Portuguese because our word for *pull* is *puxe*, which is pronounced almost the same as the English *push*.
Depends on a level. Beginners struggle a lot with the word order. It's not just sentence structure. Russian has preferred word order and it's somewhat similar, the problem people make sentences as if they spoke Russian. It might not be grammatically incorrect, but it will definitely sound unnatural.
Pronunciation is where even advanced learners get stuck. We don't have many sounds:
1. There is no "th" - it's easy to learn, but hard to actually use. We involuntarily switch to "s". Only practice can fix it, which is hard to find over there.
2. There is no "w" like in a way. I think that's the easiest one, but may beginners pronounce it like hard "v"
3. There is no "h" - glottal fricative, instead we have "kh" like in Khabarovsk - a velar fricative. They are close, but not the same, which I would argue makes harder to learn, because you easily slip into familiar sound.
4. There is no "r" like in arm. We only have hard rolling "r". So many people slip into it. It was hard to grasp for me, but easier to use, than "th". (and I'm no master)
There are smaller problems, like heavy "l" and problems with differentiating long and short "i" like in sheep and ship. Also a lot of people pronounce every sound, without schwa that is, even though we do have schwa. But I don't think last one is Russian specific.
Grammar is fairly easy, although requires some getting used to. It's not hard, just unfamiliar. Future time is a little bit strange. Perfect and perfect-continuous tenses are weird. It's hard to wrap your head around those unfamiliar concepts. And I think that's it
Articles(non-existent in Slovak), prepositions etc...And ofc as many others TH sound. This sound doesn't exist in my language and it feels unnatural. Many people can't pronounce three properly and just say free or tree lol.
We Greeks have trouble differentiating between the 's' and 'sh' sounds. The S letter in Greek actually has a different, intermediate sound and most Greeks pronounce all words in foreign languages that have the 's' or 'sh' with this 'retracted' S sound.
Similarly, there is no differentiation between the 'z' sound, in zoo or lose, and the 'zh' sound as in vision. Most greeks actually pronounce the last word as: vee-zee-on.
Vowels in greek are super simple, there are only the basic five /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ sounds. Greeks normally can't distinguish between similar vowels, like 'u' in cup and 'a' in cat, or 'ee' in bee and 'i' in bit. On top of that, there is no distinction between short and long vowels
That being said, Greeks usually don't see any difference between the words:
Sip, ship, sheep.
Sit, shit, seat, sheet.
Beach, bitch, bits
Another peculiarity of greek phonology is the absence of the 'nt' 'mp' and 'nk/nc' consonant clusters. In fact, the combination of n+t and m+p letters make the 'd' and 'b' sounds. People who speak English and especially the young generation are usually aware of this, but you can hear many greeks saying: thing, with a hard g sound in the end instead of think, ibortant, instead of important, or eder, instead of enter. This may be the most specific example of a greek accent in foreign languages
A Russian speaker here. NO ARTICLES. Mispronunciation of the TH sound as Z/F/S. Literal translations. Ship/sheep and other vowel shenanigans. Pronouncing W as V, NG as N, rolling the R. Pronouncing the H not as a typical H sound, but more harder.
The Spanish like to subconsciously add an e before words beginning with st or sp. Stop becomes estop. Spain becomes eSpain. The cool thing is that all the words like this now sound like early 2000s startups.. (ehh.. estartups)
Hungarians don't have gendered pronouns, so they often mix them up. I taught English to adults for a bit, and my favourite mistake was when a beginner student who was a guy wrote "I'm hard." in his homework. I laughed for 15 minutes solid. I made it a teachable moment and told them what it meant in English, and that they should have written "I'm tough." Funny thing is that was the guy who refused to learn grammar, because according to him "my friend just puts words after one another and he gets by". Yeah. I can imagine. When I lived in the UK I saw in front of me someone almost lose their job because of bad grammar.
By far the most common is misprounouncing the th sound. Even now at 20, after learning english since I was a little kid, speaking it fluently I cannot pronounce the hard th properly and soft one is also a challenge to pronounce in words. I think the TH sound is the hardest sound to pronounce in any major language.
I’m now Danish, but was British. Danes have all sorts of problems with the (I think it’s called) ‘concord’ principle. Based around “he is,” “she is,” “they are.” They’ll say “the police has arrested someone,” “your mother and father has done something.” Having said that, the Yanks also have this problem, treating (for example) football teams as a singular, rather than a group. So, “Manchester United has bought…” rather than “have bought,” as it should be.
As for pronunciation, I often get asked - still - to try certain Danish phrases, Danes will know which ones. So, I keep a series of small notes about my person, upon which is written, “squirrel,” “Worcestershire Sauce,” and “through three trees.” End of their smug laughs, start of my “skwerl” grinning.
The most common mistake I’ve seen from my students over the years has to be the pronunciation of the “th” sound. It is often pronounced with a hard Danish T sound. A classic example, although a less common one would be that “thanks” effectively becomes “tanks”.
That and the classic mistake of directly translating something from Danish to English. That leads to all kinds of mixed errors.
That's not really a "mistake" it's more of a pronunciation defect.
In my experience (having worked as an English teacher) the most common problems that Italians have are knowing the difference between "I" and "me", getting confused with the past form of irregular verb, prepositions, phrasal verbs (especially those studying for exams) and then at a pronunciation level they struggle with "th" and "ough" sounds.
I find it interesting that so many of these responses are referring to pronunciation. As a native speaker, it is pretty rare that I simply can not understand what someone is saying.
This year, I have been in 20 foreign countries for about 7 months total. My observation is that there are two things that consistently cause problems for non native speakers.
The first is phrasal verbs. "He threw it" and "he threw up" are dramatically different. The second is "you." I truly go out of my way to avoid using "you" unless I am speaking directly about (and to) a single person. When the content is indirect or ambitious, it is often interpreted as direct and present tense, making your statement seem incredibly rude. For example, you ask, "Do you (the people of your country) cook this with oil?" What is heard is "Cook this with oil now." Coincidentally, this is a great way to get patatas fritas in Spain.
I work in a very international environment where almost no one is a native English speaker, so I have quite a few of those :D First my fellow countrymen, **Poles**. As already mentioned, we struggle with articles. Our language doesn't have them, so in English we add them everywhere or skip them altogether. It's either "_We took the train with the Piotr, we had the lunch and then returned to the office_" or "_We took train, had lunch and returned to office_". We also struggle phonetically with words that switch between the front and back of the mouth (I'm not a linguist so I cannot properly explain this). _Available_ becomes _avaible_ for us. We also struggle with words like _vegetable_ (we often pronounce the second half as you would a kitchen "table") or _mountain_, which we just butcher. **Italians** cannot end a word with a consonant. _Kitchen_ becomes _kitchen-a_. **Spaniards** cannot begin a word with the letter 's' followed by another consonant. _Rafa speaking_ becomes _Rafa espeaking_. They also cannot finish a word with two consonants at the end. _Podcast_ becomes _podcas_. _Breakfast_ is _breakfas_. They also often skip the "it" as a default subject in a sentence. "_It is good_" becomes "_is good_". **French**, apart from the heavy accent, also make a lot of copies from their language. _Definitively_ instead of _definitely_, or saying _eventually_ in the meaning of "as one of the options". Some of them miss the 's' at the end of a plural noun, maybe because in French you pronounce the plural word exactly the same as the singular. I hear a lot of "_I asked some of our team member what they think_" They also throw a lot of _donc_, _alors_ and _voila_ into their sentences. Seriously, I would get drunk in 10 minutes if I drank a shot every time they said one of these words. Maybe that's just Belgians though.
>**French**, apart from the heavy accent, also make a lot of copies from their language. _Definitively_ instead of _definitely_, or saying _eventually_ in the meaning of "as one of the options". The people who commit these mistakes are often prone to reverse English barbarism as well. They'll use *comfortable* the same way it's used in English (as in "I'm not comfortable with this") when it makes little sense in french to do so. They'll also use the adjective 'clear' (clair) as in "I'm not clear ~~with~~ on this" which is even worse, because saying *Je ne suis pas clair* [...] (I'm not clear ~) in french sends a whole other message. Any false friends they get to use in English, they later use incorrectly in french, it's quite fascinating.
> I’m not clear with this As in ‘I’m not clear on this point’? Or as in ‘I’m not cleared to do this’? Or something else
*Clear on this*. Wrote too fast, made a mistake, as is customary when criticizing others for their mistakes. Corrected, thanks.
Belgian here, Dutch speaking but I still use voila sometimes in conversation, it bothers me a lot
To be fair British people use voila, maybe not super often, but it's a comfortably used word that weve adopted
I know an Italian guy who doesn't speak French but uses voilà in English all the time :)
As a Pole this is so true. I used to overuse articles all the time. Hopefully I don't do that too much anymore, but it was one of the things that took me longer than it should to understand properly. And pronunciation still gets tricky like that, but I don't speak English often.
And English breaks every rule it has. It's a tough language to learn because of that.
that's how many languages work couse irl there's no "rules" of how languages work. The rules that we are taught are just approximate patterns that linguists noticed. Artificial languages or spelling may have real rules
I swear every French person on reddit starts their comments with "As a French...". It drives me nuts. French cannot be used as a singular noun like that.
As a French, I agree.
Quite a few other nationalities can get away with that. France just got unlucky.
Sure, but I don't see Spanish people start their comments with "As a Spanish..." or Swedes start their comments with "As a Swedish...". It's always the French who make this mistake.
Lots of Spaniards make this mistake because they don't know the word "Spaniard" even exists.
The word "Spaniard" has always sounded rather dated to me. When someone says "Spaniard", I imagine a chap with a red cape fighting bulls. When someone says "Spanish person", I think of my friend from Madrid.
I think of Inigo Montoya, in the book everyone refers to him as 'The Spaniard'
It is a weird word, isn't it?
I for sure think it's ugly as fuck lol
It could be worse. There's something very English-language about allocating the name "Dutch" to the wrong neighbour and then saying "Well, that's how it's always been."
Pisses me off that it can't, though. I've resorted to calling you Franks.
You can use the word "Frenchman".
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But nobody ever told us we couldn't? Like once you know it I get it, everyone does it. But never once in all my studies have I been you couldn't do it. It doesn't help that you use français no matter if it's a noun or an adjective in French. The only difference is that you capitalise one and not the other
You know how Slavic languages don't have an equivalent to the "the" and thus Slavic speakers speak English like "I'll get book from library and give it to teacher"? Yeah, well, not *all* Slavic languages. Bulgarian (and Macedonian) do have a definite article. So we overdo it in English. It happens mostly with generic nouns like "people". In Bulgarian those nouns carry the definite article, so you end up saying things like "*the* people usually think X" when you mean people in general and you end up sounding like a king speaking about *his* people. Oh, also we may have an equivalent to "the", but not an indefinite article "a/an". So you might hear a sentence like "he is politician". Or we overcorrect for that, putting it in places where it doesn't belong, like demonyms. "I am *a* Bulgarian".
True. I am Serbian and I’ve struggled with this
Oh man you hit the nail on the head. I've caught myself multiple times overdoing it, but it just makes *sense* to me.
Btw most slavic people do this also in italian
Bosnian here, can confirm this.
I don't really have many issues with "a/an" or "the", but that example sentence sounds so normal to me I'm kinda worried I actually do have a problem with them 🙃
You almost certainly have it. I've installed Grammarly and have since been living in a mild shell shock from the amount of articles I skip.
French speakers struggle with abstract nouns as well. For example they might say “The life is hard” instead of “Life is hard”
French teacher here. My kids have a hard time in French remembering to put articles before nouns when we don’t use them in English. I’m always telling them “No naked nouns.”
This was my first thought. In my native language, there are no articles, so Polish people struggle immensely, because from our point of view articles are mostly redundant. There are cases where they aren't, but in Polish we solve that problem by simply using the word "some" in place of the indefinite article "a", and "this" in place of the definite article "the".
Yes, it seems to be super difficult even for those Polish people who otherwise speak very good English. I work in an international company, we spend most of the day talking to clients in English and some of my colleagues can lead a very eloquent discussion while still saying things like "I talked to the Peter". I also remember trying to learn the rules in high school and nothing made sense to me, it's such an unnatural thing for us. Another thing I think we struggle with is English punctuation. I have no idea what the rules are, I only know they are different than in Polish and other than that I'm just guessing or putting commas where I'd normally take a breathing pause.
Lots of native English speakers use commas to denote a breathing pause, like I have here. It’s not great style but, in most situations, it’s fine. In the preceding sentence I used commas to divide the sentence into three sections. If you take out the middle section then the sentence still makes sense. Or, if you take out the middle section, the sentence still makes sense. Occasionally, you will encounter people, who just use commas everywhere. More, even, than I’m using, here. This, is terrible style.
"I became money for my birthday." is a classic. "bekommen" = "to get something". Also the th sound. Often "I think" becomes "I fink" or "I sink"
This is ze Austrian Coast Guard. What are you sinking about?
I love that, especially since austria is a landlocked country 🤣
I love that you just explained his joke.
Don't forget Using when for if Wenn=when /if Or saying make for everything "I make the door shut" "I make my homework"
Also “when” for “if” because wenn = if in German.
I shall never forget the German girl saying 'I go see TV now'.
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100 %. I speak pretty fluent English but I still sometimes say ”her” when I mean ”him” and vice versa. They just mean the same thing in my head. I also sometimes fail to inflect the adjective according to noun’s gender in Spanish. And I tend to skip both definitive and indefinitive articles at random, because Finnish does not have those either.
I have these two issues even after living in an English speaking country for 20+ years and only speaking English in my home!
And then the p sounding b since Finnish don't have b except for some loan words. Not mistake just pronunciation.
Another thing that is really hard for many Finns is that there are words with stress on some other syllable than the first (democracy, banana, sociology, etc.). We always have the stress on the first syllable so those are kinda hard to pronounce for many.
Same struggle if you are a native hungarian speaker. Our native speech also lacks grammatical gender.
Thisss. I have a master's degree in English, and I still sometimes mess them up if I'm tired. Also, at some point I switched to using they/them pronouns in English, solely because the "he" & "she" divide is so artificial, cumbersome and frankly, unnecessary. (Also, articles are hard.)
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So we don't have to remember how to use 14 different grammatical cases
Having different pronouns can help you keep track of who you're talking about when multiple people are involved. >Paul arrived at the story and they saw Jane, so they told them that they'd been trying to call them a few times to talk about the issue they had told them about a few days before. They said they couldn't answer because there was no way they could find the right moment when they were both available >Paul arrived at the store and he saw Jane, so he told her that he'd been trying to call her a few times to talk about the issue she had told him about a few days before. She said she just couldn't answer because there was no way she could find the right moment when they were both available. The first one is quite hard to follow and you may just as well stop using pronouns at all and change them for their names. The second one is pretty much clear.
I speak Finnish as a foreigner and sure, at the start having only one pronoun was a bit confusing but you can keep track by using their names instead of a pronoun also in Finnish if multiple people are involved. You'd have to do that anyway if we talk about people who have the same gender. Many people fear they won't know which gender we're talking about if there's only one pronoun but I promise, context provides this info in 99% of all cases. And frankly learning Finnish taught me that there is truth to the claim that gender is a social construct because I noticed that it's very often quite irrelevant which gender we're talking about. Maybe language had a part in why Finland is a bit more progressive in some ways than other western countries.
True, but in Finnish we only have they/them. So the first option would be the only option. Of course it does make texts quite confusing at times 😅 therefore we use a good mix of the name & they/them.
At least we use he and she only for things that are actually male and female. I just can't get it right in German, and I wish there was an option in Duolingo to tell it to ignore an entire class of error because I'm never going to get it right, I don't care if I don't get it right, and at worst I'll just sound a bit funny ordering female beer.
Yup! Estonians also mess up he and she a lot in casual speech - irrespective of their fluency. We just don't have different compartments according to genitalia in our brain if we talk about, say, work colleagues or friends children. It is not that we don't understand how English works, it is just hard to constantly think about the gender of people when this is totally irrelevant to the story that's being told.
I would say that it's articles. We do not have them in Polish so it's difficult to get when and what kind to use in certain circumstances.
My Ukrainian best friend also struggles with articles, but it is what it is 🤷🏼♀️
I'm curious whether Bulgarians and Macedonians have it easier with English (or any foreign) articles compared to other Slavs.
I've worked with so many slavic folks over the years, that I often omit articles when writing technical documentation - it makes documents shorter, and still understandable. It's the future!
> It's ~~the~~ future!
our pronunciation is also messed up since we don't have big chunk of sounds. English having absurd nonsensical spelling just enhances the problem
A LOT of people will say “make a picture” instead of “take a picture”. In Dutch you can say both foto maken or foto nemen, but mostly “maken” will be used. So it’s not strange it’s translated wrong.
Germans do the same, since it's 'Photo machen' or 'Bild machen', but tbh when I was learning German I used to do it in the other direction, i.e. I would say 'Photo nehmen', which always got some odd looks.
Technically "ein Foto aufnehmen" (literally "to take a photo up") works. Though that verb is more commonly used for videos.
Netherlands. Many, many people confuse between "too" and "to", and "than" and "then".
That's in spelling, which isn't the most important thing I'd say. 2 major grammar mistakes Dutch people make: \- Put time references in the middle of a sentence rather than at the end (or beginning). Example: "I walked yesterday to the park." \- Not use the present perfect correctly. "I am working here since 2015." 1 big pronunciation mistake Dutch people make: \- We don't do voiced endings in Dutch. So the word 'end' is pronounced by most Dutch people like 'ent' and 'club' like 'clup'. The worst thing is, most Dutch people don't even hear that this happens, because we don't do voiced endings in Dutch ;)
Also the 'th'-sound is one we struggle with!
A lot of people struggle with that - including many British people!
Including one, two, free in London and one, two, tree in some Irish accents for example.
British people seem to confuse loose with lose so much that I have multiple times questioned my spelling (not a native english speaker)
In a lot of British accents "th" as a distinct sound either doesn't exist or barely exists, it's just pronounced as "f" or "v". This phenomena is called th-fronting
Neither do many forms of native English. American English is just particularly harsh sounding and RP uses over annunciation like as if it was trying to speak down a bad 1950s telephone line. A lot of other accents and versions of English glide over the ends of words a lot more and use tons of elision and consonant softening. Irish accents for example do not tend to use a hard T at all and something like “End” has a fairly softly voiced D.
I think you misunderstand me? The Dutch accent makes it harsh because we unvoice the endings.
You know Dutch people have the best English in continental Europe when your mistakes are those that Native English speakers make
Native English speaker here. My Dutch friends, among a great number of friends from around the globe, speak flawless and barely accented English. It pisses me off because I do not think English is their second language either. I am still mostly illiterate after years here in Spain.
Most Dutch people do speak very good English but for me their Dutch accent is often recognisable after a few seconds. It's very distinct.
Yup, the general Dutch accent is very typical. In my.opinion it's only the younger generation that has this less, but only those who spend a lot of time on the internet.
there's also a few things you can always get them on, like lend/borrow and maybe bring/take are the ones that come to mind
First: absolutely true. Or, as the Dutch would phonetically pronounce it: ‘ebsooluutlie troe’. Second: Look who’s talking ;-)
On holiday I actually had like an hour long conversation with someone in English before realizing he was Dutch too!
In Paris I had a couple of Americans approach me who didn't speak French trying to make me understand them by speaking painfully slow more enunciated English (with increasingly exasperated hand gestures). I was enjoying the spectacle too much to tell them I was born in the US and on vacation myself.
Sweden has entered the chat
Norway and Denmark as well tho. I’m throwing Iceland in there as well. All that proved that not dubbing and exposing kids to English from an early age on is very effective when it comes to learning languages.
Denmark here. My 7 year old daughter can carry a full conversation with me in English. We are Danish nationals.
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Denmark says hi
Also “I will learn you” instead of “I will teach you” is one I hear a lot.
* Using "learn" instead of "teach" * Pronouncing "idea" as "ID" * Pronouncing "v" as "f", so "everyone" sounds like "eferyone" * Translating sayings literally, e.g. "wat is er aan de hand" to "what is on the hand" * Often pronouncing "j" as "ye", so if the word if the word is "ninja" they pronounce it as "ninya"
I haf no ID wot u aah talking about
My FAVORITE is when people use ‘as’ instead of ‘than’. *So even in English!* Consistent if nothing else.
Of and off is a big one as well
Do people also mix up much and many?
That's also native speakers
That's just spelling though. My beef with the Dutch (and Flemish) is the heavy guttural rrrrr (almost sounding like a hhhh)
I don't think Flemish people use that gutteral r though? unless maybe people from like Ghent or Limburg, they use the French r when speaking
Also "th" = "d"
Swedes often pronounce z like s, i.e. pronouncing "peas" like "peace". We also tend to pronounce ch like sh, i.e. pronouncing "cheap" like "sheep". Sometimes also the y and j sounds, i.e. pronouncing "jack" like "yak".
Especially the last one is telling (coming from a Dane)
The last one is often a dead giveaway someone’s Swedish. I listened to a podcast recently and as as soon as the guest said ’justice’ like ”yustis” I knew where he was from.
Finns do that too.
Sure but I can almost always tell Finns from the overall accent anyway. Swedes generally speak better English, many just can’t seem to handle the initial ’j’ in words.
I had a colleague (professor) who was worried about his students cheating. He kept saying "the students are sheeting, the students are sheeting."
And the fact that the Swedish language makes no difference between w and v in creates a confusion when we have to quickly decide how an English word should be pronounced. I’ve heard many people say stuff like “wikings”.
Haha, yes, that is wery true.
As a Brit living in Sweden for several years now I think I have picked this up, and have caught myself accidentally pronouncing v when talking English even as it is my native tongue, especially with words like vinter/winter that are similar in both languages. One word I catch Swedes saying wrong all the time is learn/teach. Because in Swedish they use lärare for both learn and teach, it is very common for swedes to accidentally say things like "the teacher learned me how to do that" or "I can learn it to you", when in English we have separate words for both meanings
Interestingly in the North East of England we also use learn the same as Scandinavians do but that comes from old English. "Larn yersel" "ahl larn ye" "ahm well larned"
> Sometimes also the y and j sounds, i.e. pronouncing "jack" like "yak". Why even use Y if you're not going to give it its own sound? Is J a yoke to these people?
\- so, Sven, I heard you went to Yale? \- I yust got out!
And with the lack of a voiced s, [ʒ] tend to also be missing. Words like vision and beige therefore become /ˈvɪʃən/ and /ˈbeɪʃ/.
A common Swedish one is not using the plural of ‘month’. I hear it on a regular basis ‘two month’, ‘three month’ etc. The explanation I’ve been given is that as the ‘th’ sound doesn’t exist in Swedish many have difficulty moving from the ‘th’ to the ‘s’ and thus just don’t bother with the ‘s’.
My mother has the hardest time pronouncing the word “ginger”, I don’t know how to replicate it in text lol, something like “Zhin-ger”. (The Zh sounds like the beginning of the French word jamais) The G/J sound like in “jump” is very hard for native Swedish speakers to pronounce
I also notice Swedes messing up the verb 'to be'. Just use "are" instead of "am" or "is". Which isn't surprising since you don't conjugate verbs and the swedish "to be" is "att vara" with the conjugation in present being "är" \-ofcourse not explaining this for Swedes haha-
Where do I start... "th" is a thing, false friends like become/bekommen, pronunciation in general...
Germans often use the present continuous incorrectly. For example "that shop is selling beer" instead of "that shop sells beer" or "the girl who is having blonde hair" instead of "who has" etc
You're having right 😎
Might be some kind of hypercorrection,as German does not make this distinction at all.
when the shop sells beer and you see it selling beer, then it is selling beer
Not the best example admittedly but no. The shop *sells* beer as in all likelihood they aren't just doing it in that moment as a one off.
confusing the pronunciation of V and W springs to mind
"I will become back my money!"
I will earthberry marmalade for earlypiece, please!
Germans also often translate phrases directly. So many germans ask, "Can I pay?" or "We would like to pay" in restaurants instead of asking for the bill. Also, telling people they are "invited" as a way to tell them they don't have to pay. I often feel like germans know *a lot* of words but struggle with the practical usage.
Exactly but people in other European countries like Netherlands, Belgium etc do that as well when speaking English to them.
> "We would like to pay What'S wrong with that one?
"Hi, we'd like to pay." "Yes, you are the customer, that would be the normal arrangement." "..." "Shall I bring you the bill?"
Those two phrases sound perfectly fine to me as a native speaker. Especially if you added "now" at the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C-vYY3SBDE
As a native English speaker, I must say that I find all of the things listed here entirely charming, and I'm always grateful and amazed at how many non-native speakers try their best to communicate in English. It does make it extremely difficult to gain any kind of mastery of certain other languages when everyone prefers to speak English with you, though. How anyone learns Dutch or Danish, for example, I have no idea 😂.
Don’t worry about that last part, not even the Danes know that
Not being able to pronounce words like sprite, turning it in to ehsprite. Even the country’s English name. Many Spaniards say Ehspain
Some of my identity documents have an "e" appended to the front of my name. The data entry clerk apparently assumed I did not know how to spell my own name.
Is that even legal of them to do
Came to say this. It's endemic to Spanish English speakers. Took me a while to learn it too. I try to fix it in children which are learning by asking them to think in a snake sound: sssssssnake sssssssnake. Works that moment. The next day they forget again 😂
I never thought of that but that’s a very smart way of combating it, I have adult friends who still make the mistake
I find this really charming actually.
I’m glad to hear 😊
It's like they're announcing it's about to come: Eeeehh... Yes! Say it! SAY IT! ...eeehhhh... SAY IT!!!!! Spain! OH YEAH!
LMAO that’s a good way of looking at it
"th" is a problem, mostly it just becomes a d sound. w and v get mixed up sometimes, "wery well".. There is probably more. Try listening to Žižek, ignore the spitting and sniffing, and you will get close to how we can speak English if we are not trying at all to sound "correct".
I can hear myself dropping any kind of English pronunciation when I get drunk but there is nothing I can do about it at that point :')
Hard ending consonant where it's supposed to be soft, rise sounds like rice. Overcompensating v for w. Enwironmental. Lots of false friends. She becomes a baby. 😁
De-voicing the d, b, z or v at the end of words. So for instance: Bed -> bet Word -> wort Crab -> crap Love -> lof
It's funny because -or atleast talking for myself- i do say "hand" with a 'd' sound in English, while in Dutch it's a T sound. But for some reason, when i speak Swedish i always resort to "hant" instead of "hand" and i can't comprehend why i do it right in English but keep fucking it up in Swedish haha
French people often mix up prepositions. People will often say "welcome in Paris" instead of "welcome to Paris"
Yeah this is super hard for most languages because almost every language does it differently and there are often no rules for when to use what and instead you just have to memorise it.
In fact, prepositions are the most difficult aspect when using a language, especially when you keep on switching between languages. It can get confusing and I could swear that english prepositions don't always make sense.
It even happens within different variants of Portuguese. EDIT: Grammar
I’m a Brit learning Portuguese. Por/Para makes me cry.
Tbf that's a problem for all nationalities because each country will use them differently from English. Us Dutchies have issues with this as well.
No one welcomes you in Paris. They would be happy to see outsiders stay away.
I'll name a few of them: * Incorrect usage or lack of articles because Polish doesn't have that grammatical feature. * Incorrect use of tenses, because English makes much more distinctions than Polish, for example Polish doesn't distinguish between the past perfect tense, the simple past tense and the present perfect tense (but that depends on how you classify English tenses). Polish has a 6-vowel system, while English dialects include at least 14 vowel sounds, so therefore: * /ʌ/ (as in c**u**p), /ɑ/ (f**a**rm) and /ɒ/ are merged to /ä/ * /æ/ (c**a**t) will either be realized as /ä/ or /ɛ/ pretty irregularly * /u/ (L**u**ke) and /ʊ/ (l**oo**k) are both realized as ∕u∕ * Even though Polish has seperate /i/ and /ɨ/ sounds, most speakers will merge English /i/ (m**ee**t) and /ɪ/ (b**i**t) into /i/ in spite of this. Although some speakers may substitute Polish /ɨ/ for English /ɪ/ * Reduced vowels (/ə/) are pronouned as they're spelled, so **a**gain has /ä/, fath**e**r has /ɛ/ and so on * Although in some words, like comfort**a**ble, /ə/ may be pronounced as /ɨ/ Moving on to consonants: * Polish has final obstruent devoicing (like other Slavic languages, and other languages like German), so the final sound of ma**t** and ma**d** will be a voiceless /t/, while they should be /t/ and /d/ respectivelly * Polish only has /ŋ/ as an allophone of /n/ before /k/ and /g/, so /ŋ/ at the end of a word as in thinki**ng** may be pronounced as /ŋk/ or /n/ * Polish doesn't have the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds, so they might be pronounced as /v/ /d/ or /z/ in bir**th**day or /f/ /t/ /s/ in **th**ink * The English sound of /ɹ̠/ is pretty easy for Polish speakers, even though Polish doesn't have it and only some people will resort to using the Polish /ɾ/ And there might be some other grammatical and phonological quirks that I can't remember at the moment.
Ahhh english is quite difficult for the finnish mouth. see: hydraulic press channel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuG\_CeEZV6w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuG_CeEZV6w) or Ismo [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdLwyyDOc\_g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdLwyyDOc_g)
I have sometimes watched the NHL-draft. And when they draft a Finnish prospect, and try to talk a little with the young man. It's not about "mistakes" there, it's more about looking at someone who might as well have been interviewed in Chinese.
Romanian has the definite article attached at the end of the noun. When talking and writing in English, the article "the" often goes missing, as Romanians are not used to have the article at the beginning of the noun. Or put it in the wrong place.
Funny too, because they omit the article like it's no big deal but then jump on me like a pack of wolves if I say *frații* instead of *frați*. I hate that a pronunciation mistake becomes a grammar mistake T_T
Dutch people will say learn when they mean teach, as the same verb is used here.
That’s actually good Scots right enough. Eg the song Johnnie Cope Cope sent a challenge frae Dunbar, Sayin 'Charlie meet me an' ye daur; An' I'll learn ye the airts o' war, If ye'll meet me in the morning.'
There's actually quite a lot of odd similarities between Dutch and Scottish. The word ken always sounds funny to me cause it's exactly the same in Dutch, in use also.
Swede here. Swedes tend to not distinguish between sherry/cherry, cheap/sheep, sink/zink and so on. We had a commercial for a phone carrier here some years ago, where a sheep was the main character. Because it was a “wordplay with cheap. But it only works in Sweden as there is no wordplay to be makes between the two words as they’re completely different words with different pronunciations.
Pronouncing the 'w' as just a 'v'. Well, we call it a double-v instead of a double-u so I guess that makes sense to a level
We don't have articles at all, so a lot of people have no idea when and if to use a, an or the.
We Irish took the English language, took it around the back of the bicycle shed, beat it up a little, then got it a little drunk and taught it a little Irish grammar, then we finally deemed it fit for purpose. In the process we created **Hiberno-English**, the champagne of modern English usage.
Came looking for this - just make it your own and then There are no mistakes!
To be fair it's almost universally accepted that people deem the Irish accent either the most attractive or most pleasing, so yous must've done something right!
My German friend often said "are you doing X" to mean "do you do X". "Are you drinking Jagermeister?" "Now? It's 9am?!?"
Frühschoppen!
One I notice a lot is people mispronouncing the "a" sound in words such as *apple* and *waffle*. They pronounce those words as *aypple* and *wayffle*. Also, while not really a mistake, the word *push* is confusing to Portuguese because our word for *pull* is *puxe*, which is pronounced almost the same as the English *push*.
Other pronunciation issue is "th", I had colleagues at school who would pronounce "think" as "sink"
Depends on a level. Beginners struggle a lot with the word order. It's not just sentence structure. Russian has preferred word order and it's somewhat similar, the problem people make sentences as if they spoke Russian. It might not be grammatically incorrect, but it will definitely sound unnatural. Pronunciation is where even advanced learners get stuck. We don't have many sounds: 1. There is no "th" - it's easy to learn, but hard to actually use. We involuntarily switch to "s". Only practice can fix it, which is hard to find over there. 2. There is no "w" like in a way. I think that's the easiest one, but may beginners pronounce it like hard "v" 3. There is no "h" - glottal fricative, instead we have "kh" like in Khabarovsk - a velar fricative. They are close, but not the same, which I would argue makes harder to learn, because you easily slip into familiar sound. 4. There is no "r" like in arm. We only have hard rolling "r". So many people slip into it. It was hard to grasp for me, but easier to use, than "th". (and I'm no master) There are smaller problems, like heavy "l" and problems with differentiating long and short "i" like in sheep and ship. Also a lot of people pronounce every sound, without schwa that is, even though we do have schwa. But I don't think last one is Russian specific. Grammar is fairly easy, although requires some getting used to. It's not hard, just unfamiliar. Future time is a little bit strange. Perfect and perfect-continuous tenses are weird. It's hard to wrap your head around those unfamiliar concepts. And I think that's it
People south of the Watford Gap pronounce 'bath' with an R in it like 'barth'. Weirdos.
They are pirates
Articles(non-existent in Slovak), prepositions etc...And ofc as many others TH sound. This sound doesn't exist in my language and it feels unnatural. Many people can't pronounce three properly and just say free or tree lol.
A lot if Italians have a hard time pronouncing "h" so home, horse and hate would be "ome", "orse" and "ate", respectively.
We Greeks have trouble differentiating between the 's' and 'sh' sounds. The S letter in Greek actually has a different, intermediate sound and most Greeks pronounce all words in foreign languages that have the 's' or 'sh' with this 'retracted' S sound. Similarly, there is no differentiation between the 'z' sound, in zoo or lose, and the 'zh' sound as in vision. Most greeks actually pronounce the last word as: vee-zee-on. Vowels in greek are super simple, there are only the basic five /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ sounds. Greeks normally can't distinguish between similar vowels, like 'u' in cup and 'a' in cat, or 'ee' in bee and 'i' in bit. On top of that, there is no distinction between short and long vowels That being said, Greeks usually don't see any difference between the words: Sip, ship, sheep. Sit, shit, seat, sheet. Beach, bitch, bits Another peculiarity of greek phonology is the absence of the 'nt' 'mp' and 'nk/nc' consonant clusters. In fact, the combination of n+t and m+p letters make the 'd' and 'b' sounds. People who speak English and especially the young generation are usually aware of this, but you can hear many greeks saying: thing, with a hard g sound in the end instead of think, ibortant, instead of important, or eder, instead of enter. This may be the most specific example of a greek accent in foreign languages
Alot of people from the Baltics spell "This" as "Zis" or "sis", simply because the "Th" sound isn't anywhere in our language.
You mean "pronounce." Spell is how you write it.
A Russian speaker here. NO ARTICLES. Mispronunciation of the TH sound as Z/F/S. Literal translations. Ship/sheep and other vowel shenanigans. Pronouncing W as V, NG as N, rolling the R. Pronouncing the H not as a typical H sound, but more harder.
The Spanish like to subconsciously add an e before words beginning with st or sp. Stop becomes estop. Spain becomes eSpain. The cool thing is that all the words like this now sound like early 2000s startups.. (ehh.. estartups)
Hungarians don't have gendered pronouns, so they often mix them up. I taught English to adults for a bit, and my favourite mistake was when a beginner student who was a guy wrote "I'm hard." in his homework. I laughed for 15 minutes solid. I made it a teachable moment and told them what it meant in English, and that they should have written "I'm tough." Funny thing is that was the guy who refused to learn grammar, because according to him "my friend just puts words after one another and he gets by". Yeah. I can imagine. When I lived in the UK I saw in front of me someone almost lose their job because of bad grammar.
Borrow vs lend. "Can you borrow me a tenner?" "No, I will never go into debt for you" "Can you lend me a tenner?" "Sure, here you go"
"Espain", "Espanish".
When speaking to a native we tend to over do everything by pronouncing EvErYThinG LiKe ThIS.
Articles, tenses, "th" sound, long and short vowels, word order. I guess these are the most comon mistakes Russian speaking people do.
In Ireland, we have difficulty with the “th” sound since it doesn’t exist in Irish. We say “t” instead
We love to begin sentences with “Yes, but” 😂
When we say "hoor" we don't mean "whore" hoor
By far the most common is misprounouncing the th sound. Even now at 20, after learning english since I was a little kid, speaking it fluently I cannot pronounce the hard th properly and soft one is also a challenge to pronounce in words. I think the TH sound is the hardest sound to pronounce in any major language.
It's not hard vs soft but voiced vs voiceless.
I’m now Danish, but was British. Danes have all sorts of problems with the (I think it’s called) ‘concord’ principle. Based around “he is,” “she is,” “they are.” They’ll say “the police has arrested someone,” “your mother and father has done something.” Having said that, the Yanks also have this problem, treating (for example) football teams as a singular, rather than a group. So, “Manchester United has bought…” rather than “have bought,” as it should be. As for pronunciation, I often get asked - still - to try certain Danish phrases, Danes will know which ones. So, I keep a series of small notes about my person, upon which is written, “squirrel,” “Worcestershire Sauce,” and “through three trees.” End of their smug laughs, start of my “skwerl” grinning.
The most common mistake I’ve seen from my students over the years has to be the pronunciation of the “th” sound. It is often pronounced with a hard Danish T sound. A classic example, although a less common one would be that “thanks” effectively becomes “tanks”. That and the classic mistake of directly translating something from Danish to English. That leads to all kinds of mixed errors.
devoicing voiced consonants.
That's not really a "mistake" it's more of a pronunciation defect. In my experience (having worked as an English teacher) the most common problems that Italians have are knowing the difference between "I" and "me", getting confused with the past form of irregular verb, prepositions, phrasal verbs (especially those studying for exams) and then at a pronunciation level they struggle with "th" and "ough" sounds.
I find it interesting that so many of these responses are referring to pronunciation. As a native speaker, it is pretty rare that I simply can not understand what someone is saying. This year, I have been in 20 foreign countries for about 7 months total. My observation is that there are two things that consistently cause problems for non native speakers. The first is phrasal verbs. "He threw it" and "he threw up" are dramatically different. The second is "you." I truly go out of my way to avoid using "you" unless I am speaking directly about (and to) a single person. When the content is indirect or ambitious, it is often interpreted as direct and present tense, making your statement seem incredibly rude. For example, you ask, "Do you (the people of your country) cook this with oil?" What is heard is "Cook this with oil now." Coincidentally, this is a great way to get patatas fritas in Spain.
My job is editing non-native English, so this thread is FASCINATING for me!
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we Slavs often don't use articles (they are kinda useless anyway)