Mine is people who separate words when they write. I’m Norwegian, and we can string together words indefinetly to make a new word. The never ending word may not make any sense, but it is gramatically correct
Still, people write words the wrong way by separating them.
Examples:
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“Ananas ringer” means “the pineapple is calling” when written the wrong way. The correct way is “ananasringer” and it means “pineapple rings” (from a tin).
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“Prinsesse pult i vinkel” means “a princess fucked at an angle”. The correct way to write it is “prinsessepult i vinkel”, and it means “an angeled princess desk” (a desk for children, obviously)
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“Koke bøker” means “to cook books”. The correct way is “kokebøker” and means “cookbooks”
I see these kinds of mistakes everywhere!
Ambiguously used words like “biweekly”. Does it mean twice per week? Every other week? Business meeting calendar scheduling terminology is especially bad with this.
Odd phrases like you can chop the tree down. Then but then you proceed to chop that same tree up.
Parking in a driveway and driving in a parkway is also a good one.
A driveway is where you drive to get the residence, vs the walkway. Parkways are landscaped with park-like greenery .
After your alarm goes off… You turn it off.
Norwegian is more accurate. “Biweekly” means “annenhver uke” (every other week)
It does here too. It’s not an unclear thing, just not used all the time so people don’t remember.
Biweekly is every other week, fortnightly.
Semiweekly is twice a week.
How numbers are pronounced.
In German the number 185 is pronounced as “hundred-five-and-eighty” (hundertfünfundachtzig), the digits are not spoken in order of their magnitude.
Not terrible, not great.be the change you want to see, all young germans should start saying numbers sensibly and call anyone who does it the old way a boomer
Please dont
Wait, a case where English is more logical? There must be some mistake!
“Hundre-og-åtti-fem”
It’s not so much a feature of English as it is a recurring bug in the way people use the language…
If you write “of” instead of “have” or “'ve” you need to be taken out back and beaten with a dictionary, preferably until you can apologize to your ancestors in person for the effort they wasted in passing down the English language to you.
Incidentally, when did people start saying “on accident”? It’s by accident! Has been for ages! Why this? Why now? I hate it.
With that out of the way… English isn’t a language, it’s five dialects in a trenchcoat mugging other languages in a dark alley for their loose grammar.
Edit: With regards to OP, “a cookbook” and “to cook the books” are similar phrases in English, too, but have, eh, wildly different meanings. XD
“of” in place of “have” certainly had to come from people mishearing/misunderstanding “ve.” There’s no other explanation.
The accident one is funny. I had to really think about when I’d use “on”, and it’s when I say something like: “he did it on accident.” Which is wrong when I think about it, but I know I’ve said this countless times. I can only guess it grew from “an accident” like “it was an accident.”
Even though "on"and “by” are the same length, “by” sounds like it takes too much effort to say. How weird.
Prepositions are so arbitrary. So it’s really stupid to be so angry about “on accident”. But I can’t help it.
The past tense of lead is led, which is pronounced like lead but is not pronounced like lead.
Don’t get me started on read, read, and red…
In French they fucking have the same word for “no more” and “more”, and only differs in pronounciation of the last letter:
“J’ai plus de pommes” pronounced as “j’ai plu de pommes” means “I have no more apples” (nobody says the “ne” particle)
“J’ai plus de pommes (que toi)” pronounced as “j’ai plus de pommes (que toi)” means “I have more apples (than you)”
Which is even worse because usually last letter is not pronounced, so that makes it an exception to the rule
Simply emphasise the last letter more.
But the last letter is silent.
Yep.
In some Caribbean Englishes, the pronunciations of the words “can” and “can’t”, which are opposites, differ only in vowel length: kyan, kyaan.
Mon Dieu!!! Zut alors!!! Quelle merde!!!
Oh, same problem as flammable and inflammable.
So does that mean you can’t tell them apart in writing? Or in writing would that “ne particle” you mention be there?
It depends, sometimes «ne» appears, sometimes people just skip the last letter, so they write «plu» or «pu» to mean «no more»
Now try “I have more apples in my car” and “I don’t have more apples on my car”.
Sounds like the people who try to keep french pure and proper should focus more on the ‘ne’.
That second example is… Wow.
These are all real examples. Here’s a picture of someone posting that they want to give away a princess desk
Last sentence, “godt brukt”, means “well used”
Princess fucked at and angle. Well Used.
I mean… It still fits?
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What I hate about English is what I love about English. The spelling.
I hate that it’s an impossible system to teach in any logical way. No child can sound out common words like “once”.
But I love that the ridiculous spelling of our words gives you a look into the history of the language. That it’s not just transliterations of the sounds, but letters in a pattern that holds more information than that.
“Do you mind …” has been mis-answered for so long that yes means no. It’s hard to explain because written down, yes/no have different meanings, but when speaking to someone it depends on tone, context, and body language.
“Do you mind if I take that seat”
“No” “Yeah” depending on tone can both mean, “I’m fine with you taking that seat”. Most people will add on to make the intention clearer like, “Yeah, go ahead” but not always. Absolutely crazy.
Norwegian is easier. If you see a vacant seat, you don’t use it because sitting next to some one is what psychopaths do. You’re not a psychopath, are you?
In these situations, when people say “take that seat”, they usually mean it literally. As in take the seat with them and use it at the table they actually want to sit at.
The problem is that “do you mind if” is really just an indirect way of saying “may I.” People often tend to reply to the actual meaning rather than the literal meaning.
My language is diglossic - it has a written form and a spoken form that are very different to each other. It’s quite difficult to understand the written form if you’ve only grown up speaking and listening to the language, as the written form is essentially the language as spoken in the 1600s.
To compare it to English, it would be like saying “Where are you?” to someone over the phone, but then having to send them “Wherefore art thou?” as a text.
What is this mysterious language?
Informal English
Sims anlikeli to me
“wherefore” means “why” not “where”.
She wasn’t asking him “where are you?” but rather “why did it have to be you?”
Ah I see, thanks for the correction! (It also kind of demonstrates the problems I have with my own language :P)
“Whither” (to where) might be a closer fit than “wherefore” (why)
skill issue
The four cases. Nominative, Genitive, Dative, and Akkusative with their accompanying articles. It makes learning German as a second language a nightmare and even native speakers struggle with it a lot.
Ah man, I think cases are great! I learned Russian in college, which has six cases, and they can be used to express so much with so little. English used to have them, you can see remnants in the apostrophe ‘s’ when denoting possession, and I’m bummed they went away.
I’ll give it to you that they’re a pain in the ass to learn, but once you get the hang of them I think they’re super neat!
Edit: they also allow for variable sentence structure which can be super fun and, again, express a lot of meaning just through text (at least in Russian, not sure if that’s the case in German).
The thing I hate about English is that it pretends to have formal rules for sentence structure and grammar, and they are all basically optional to some degree, but plenty of English speakers get really grumpy when people break them. English isn’t like French where there is a literal governing body who is in charge of setting the formal rules for the language - English is a cluster fuck of borrowed words and structures mashed together in a barely coherent mess, stop acting like “should’a” is a violation of section 16.4 subsection 4
We got a governing body that decides what is correct or not when it comes to our two written languages, bokmål and nynorsk. They do not control speach and what is “correct” to say. I recent years the younger generations (I’m millenial, so not young any more 😢) have began merging two sounds, the sj- /∫/ og kj-sounds /ç/ with only the sj-sound. They can’t even hear the diference. This results in funny situations for us who can hear and pronounce the different sounds when used in words.
Kjede, pronounced with /ç/ at the start, means chain (can be used to describe various types of chains).
Sjede, pronounced with /∫/ at the start, means vagina.
The younger generation pronounced both words with /∫/ at the start. This makes the word “kjedekollisjon” not mean “chain collision” any more, but “vagina collision”. “Halskjede” with a /∫/, suddenly means “neck vagina”, not “necklace”. And so on. Language is fun.
I think it’s precisely because there is no governing body for English and all the rules are colloquial, developed through usage, that people do get grumpy! They are the only ones who can create and enforce the rules! Each English speaker feels personally responsible and compelled to correct use they perceive is in violation of the rules the way they want them to be. If they don’t do it right then and there, no one else can.
English having no consistent spelling, grammar or pronunciation.
Spelling and pronunciation were actually standardized and spelling technically still is. The problem is that the standardization is from a previous version of English with different pronunciation.
Same as the norwegian “hjerne” and “gjerne”. They are pronouced the same, but the first is “brain” the secon is “yes, please”
“Hjort” and “gjort”. Also pronounced the same, but the first one is “deer” and the second is “have done that”.
Easy
German: I hate that we use comma as a decimal separator. Makes working with international documents a hassle, my numpad on pc makes a comma so I cannot even type a date…we like to complain about us imperial units as much as anyone but our comma is almost as stupid!
The funny thing is, that most of the world uses commas as decimal separator and comma is the preferred decimal separator by ISO. But instead, in English speaking countries, the period is used as the decimal separator. Actually it comes from the original decimal separator, that was used in the British Empire called
⟨·⟩. When they were changing units to metric, ISO didn’t recognize interpunct as a decimal separator, because it was too similar to the multiplication sign used in other countries. So after some debate in the UK, they’ve adopted the period, because the US was already using it. From the British Empire, South Africa instead adopted the comma.
I did not know that. Very interesting, thanks. Not so fun fact: Switzerland, although German speaking, does not use the comma. Also their keyboard Layout is all over the place with German French and Italian influences.
German here, we have the exact same issue. It’s driving me crazy.
Any number higher than twelve is said the wrong way around, for example instead of ninety-two we say two-and-ninety.
In the Welsh language we say the number of tens then the number. One - Un (pronounced een) Ten - Deg Eleven - Un deg un - one ten one
Three - Tri Thirty - Tri deg - three ten Thirty-one - Tri deg un - three ten one
