Most Common Mistakes Romance Speakers Make in English
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- čas přidán 23. 05. 2023
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On this video I'll share my experience as an English teacher and international examiner, reviewing data from hundreds of tests.
An error (from the Latin error, meaning "wandering")[1] is an action which is inaccurate or incorrect.[2] In some usages, an error is synonymous with a mistake. The etymology derives from the Latin term 'errare', meaning 'to stray'.
In statistics, "error" refers to the difference between the value which has been computed and the correct value.[3] An error could result in failure or in a deviation from the intended performance or behavior.[4]
Human behavior
One reference differentiates between "error" and "mistake" as follows:
An 'error' is a deviation from accuracy or correctness. A 'mistake' is an error caused by a fault: the fault being misjudgment, carelessness, or forgetfulness. Now, say that I run a stop sign because I was in a hurry, and wasn't concentrating, and the police stop me, that is a mistake. If, however, I try to park in an area with conflicting signs, and I get a ticket because I was incorrect on my interpretation of what the signs meant, that would be an error. The first time it would be an error. The second time it would be a mistake since I should have known better.[5]
In human behavior the norms or expectations for behavior or its consequences can be derived from the intention of the actor or from the expectations of other individuals or from a social grouping or from social norms. (See deviance.) Gaffes and faux pas can be labels for certain instances of this kind of error. More serious departures from social norms carry labels such as misbehavior and labels from the legal system, such as misdemeanor and crime. Departures from norms connected to religion can have other labels, such as sin.
An individual language user's deviations from standard language norms in grammar, pronunciation and orthography are sometimes referred to as errors. However, in light of the role of language usage in everyday social class distinctions, many feel that linguistics should restrain itself from such prescriptivist judgments to avoid reinforcing dominant class value claims about what linguistic forms should and should not be used. One may distinguish various kinds of linguistic errors[6] - some, such as aphasia or speech disorders, where the user is unable to say what they intend to, are generally considered errors, while cases where natural, intended speech is non-standard (as in vernacular dialects), are considered legitimate speech in scholarly linguistics, but might be considered errors in prescriptivist contexts. See also Error analysis (linguistics).
#language #english #mistakes
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I wanted to ask a question about about another thing I thought might be a quirk for romance speakers.
I don't know Italian, but I know in Spanish, my L2, that adjectives are numbered, so in your example "I like red cars" vs "i like the red cars" could it be possible that someone might intuitively say "I like the reds cars/cars reds." ?
As a Greek I have many similar problems with English but the worst, by far, was and still is to a degree pronunciation. When I first started I was mad that the same letters correspond to different sounds depending on the word.
I'm an English native learning Greek and I've been impressed with how consistent it is. My biggest problem is pronouncing the unfamiliar sound combinations.
@@incrediblemulk42 When I started with Greek I was always adding an E sound before the ξ. We're fortunate at least that both Greek and English share the theta and delta sounds.
Aha as an English speaker i was so happy learning Swahili cause it was so consistent so I thought English must be the worst language for spelling things different than they sound- then I started learning Urdu 😭😭
I feel like the hardest part for greek speakers is distinguishing s and sh and the vowels in bit and beat and fan and fun.
This troubles native English speakers too.
The lead of this semiconductor chip is made of lead.
I sow seeds, but then the sow will root them up.
What one doe does, the other does do.
The boat had a bow tied on its bow.
I read the book.
Singer, finger, ginger, banger, anger, danger.
As a Slav, we do not have articles at all and I catch myself using them incorrectly in English (both dropping AND overusing) sometimes
Slavs are one group that tend to have a hard time using articles correctly, as their languages don't have them. The etymology of articles can help. Indefinite articles are typically cognate with the word "one" in a language. Definite articles are typically cognate with the word "that" in a language.
It's interesting because Latin is the same for the most part.
I really appreciate the simplicity of English articles after learning German.
I hope you could do a vice-versa video in which you feature the mistakes English speakers make when learning Italian (or Romance languages in general)
My late mother-in-law's second husband was Italian who'd been in England for a couple of decades before they met. His English was pretty good but there were some pronunciations he never quite mastered. His speech quirks were so much a part of him they didn't sound odd once I was accustomed to them, it was not much different to regional variations in pronunciation found in England. He died a few years ago and is very much missed. Your video brought back so many memories, I could hear his voice alongside yours. Thanks for triggering such happy memories of a really special man.
in Linguistic terms we say Spanish and Italian have a shallow orthography (the way it is written represents the way we speak , at least most of the time) and English has a deep orthography (The spelling represents the etymology of the word rather than the actual pronunciation of the word) P.D: English used to have a more shallow orthography. Also the Great Vowel shift made the pronunciatino of words change a great deal.
One weird error I've seen from time to time, not necessarily from Romance speakers, is a sort of "double past" where not only do they put the main verb in the past tense, they also put the infinitive in that tense too. Example "He didn't knew. He didn't helped." It's... an interesting one. I remember learning a bit of Norwegian and thinking "Jeg vil har" instead of the correct "Jeg vil ha", "I want to have", so i can kind of see where it's coming from.
My Portuguese friend Maria does this while sounding super British
It's a common mistake I used to make when I started learning the past tense. The reason why we do it is because we always conjugate verbs in the past tense in affirmative, negative sentences and questions in Romance languages. You English speakers don't. You conjugate verbs in the past tense only in affirmative sentences. In negative sentences and questions you use the auxiliary did and leave the main verb in its bare form. "I knew" conjugated but "I didn't know" "did I know" not conjugated. I've learned many languages and so far I know only English does this in the past tense. I don't know another language which has this particular feature.
@mep6302 There is a conjugated verb, but it's "did", the past tense of "do". If I remember right, English likely got this construction from the Celtic languages in Britain, such as Welsh. The construction is basically a negated do + infinitive.
Apparently, there are also similar constructions in languages like Persian and Hindi (light verbs) and the Uralic languages (which use a negative verb with the infinitive). It makes me almost wonder if there was some sort of Uralic language or language that used a negative verb spoken in the British isles before the Celts came along, and the Celts got it from them.
It doesn't help that English speakers, especially in certain dialects, will do this as well. Double negatives are also a big one that certain dialects do a lot.
As a native English speaker who is trying to learn a foreign language I often stop and wonder to my self about why some things in English are phrased as they are as I look at other languages and think that the way their grammar works is nicer, cleaner or just makes more sense than how we would phrase it in English.
History of English Podcast might be a good one for you. He starts with the PIE language (or at least the theorized language) and then moves forward. It explains a lot.
@@MrRabiddogg Sounds interesting I'll have a look for it :) thank you for the recommendation.
English is an amalgamation of two basically different languages,Norman French and Anglo-Saxon with a plethora of words borrowed out of other,often unrelated languages.It's a wonder people who grew up with don't have more confusion .lol.
@@patricialavery8270 I guess if its the only thing you know then everything will seem normal
@@patricialavery8270 Old Norse also had an impact to English ...the Vikings ruled in more than half England for quite 2 centuries which left some significant marks in behalf of vocabulary and to name just a few those are words like "sky", "skull", "skill", "skin","ill", "leg", "egg", "window", "anger", "bole", "knife", "ugly"," husband" .. or the ending "-son" for surnames which all were originated from Old Norse and not from Anglo Saxon some of those words have of course equivalents originated from Old Saxon which are both in use today but the semantic meaning switch a little bit in order to have variety in expressing things but back then those meant exactly the same in both languages like what was in Anglo Saxon "sick"was in Old Norse "ill" or Anglo Saxon "craft" was Old Norse "skill"
Even for native English speakers, there are differences between countries and regions. Another issue is how English changes from generation to generation. The more common use of slang often causes exceptions to the rules and confuses non-natives. There are also differences in academic, business, general verbal, and several ways of writing using English. I grew up between both UK and American English along with terms no longer used but were common in my home.
I really enjoyed this video. I made it from English teacher to English Professor to English supervisor to English department head, and quickly found a way to escape administrative politics and get back to just teaching. I found that the way to deal with students who say "I heard X in a movie, on the street or my non-native teacher's class" was to ask if the student had ever heard a foreigner mangling his language, or if farmers and low level workers in their country speak the same way as university professors. Students from countries where social position is very important [Korea, Japan, Italy, etc.] were usually appalled by the notion that they might be mistaken for lower strata. The British are far worse than Americans on this issue, while some Aussies don't care what anyone thinks. What a great and very entertaining video.
My Italian husband cannot rid himself of the habit of making compound words using the Italian method of verb first, object second. This delightful habit has given our family, for example, the "mowlawner" and the "whackweeder". Lol.
Always continue speaking Metatron. And especially the TRUTH
In English, "the United States" used to be construed as plural, but now is construed as singular. In Spanish (at least in North Carolina), it's commonly said "Estados Unidos", with no article, and construed as singular.
You seem like, you'd be the best dinner guest. Because of how you make regular language. Just so much more fun.
This is really good.
From now on, I am going to make all my Espanish espeaking clients that are learning English watch this.
Greetings from Espain.
Thanks, for the video! The inverse is also true. I've been teaching myself a romance language for a little over 2 years now. The "the" just seemed to be placed everywhere in a sentence, with out the importance of "the" in English. "The girl ate THE apple" and the days of the week got me too.
I had a muslim Danish friend in UK high school, he used to say "canted" instead of could. It took me a while to work out what he meant but we had fun getting there lol 😂❤
I would not have known Metatron is Italian if he hadn't said so. The only thing I can think of him doing to give it away is confusing the words "nephew" and "grandson" in a video, which is a very Italian mistake.
What? O.o, in this channel, he goes actually crazy in the "Do not learn Italian from this channel" video.... O.O
6:27 "This new feature enhances tremendously the user's experience..." Putting the adverb between the verb and the object is a dead giveaway that he is not a native speaker of English. I don't think it would tell you that he was Italian, specifically, but I gather that it is something that speakers of Romance languages do.
I noticed something in your pronunciation that reflects a greater proximity to speakers of British English. The difference between how "t" and "d" are pronounced in most American English accents is more subtle than in most British accents.
The "ed" in "kissed" and "washed" are less fronted in American English. If I were to use the "t" sound, it would be more fronted with the tip of my tongue closer to my teeth, if not touching my teeth. When I use the "d" sound in "kissed" or "washed," it is from further back in the mouth.
An example of this is Lawrence Brown of "Lost In The Pond." He cannot hear the differences between "t" and "d" sounds when his American wife, Tara, vocalizes them. As a native American English speaker, I can hear the difference.
I'm Finnish and we don't have articles, so sometimes I forget to add them when writing in English. Also we don't have future tense, so sometimes I forget to use that too.
2:21 on capitalisation. When I started studying German, I was intrigued by the fact that they capitalise all nouns, not only proper nouns.
It would be interesting to see a list of things that different language groups do in their native language, which is grammatically incorrect to what is taught as correct in schools.
French native. Made them all. (Including the hands).
I would add that English must have the complement directly after the verb, while in French you can stick things in the middle if you want. You can even have a complement before the verb.
What do you mean by "complement"?
@@oyoo3323 probably the direct/indirect objects (?). In Portuguese they're called "complemento direto/indireto" so that's my guess lol
@@oyoo3323 In grammar, a complement is a word, phrase, or clause that is necessary to complete the meaning of a given expression.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complement_(linguistics)#:~:text=In%20grammar%2C%20a%20complement%20is,the%20meaning%20of%20a%20predicate).
@@michellechat4317 I see. I didn't know that's what it was called.
Is this a reference to what Metatron does at 6:27?
a video explaining the placement of the adjectives sounds like a great idea
I'd bet red, read, and read are fun too.
I always enjoy your videos.
When I got back from spending five weeks in Italy with my relatives, I noticed I brought back some Italian tendencies in English. One thing that I didn’t realize until my friend pointed it out to me is that I would do switch up the word order of my sentences. For example, I would say, “the cart, did you see where the guest left it?” instead of “did you see where the guest left the cart?” Another thing I started to do is just make the “ehh” noise when I wanted to acknowledge something positively. The last thing is I’d do is say ok like an Italian, saying more oh-kei instead of oh-kay. If you know Italians, you’ll get some of these things.
Excellent video as always! Compliments to you! 👏❤
Five weeks are enough to get Italianized? 😂
@@paolocarpi4769 ma quando stai insieme ai parenti che non parlano inglese per nulla, bastano solo 5 settimane per influenzare il proprio modo di parlare. Non è che ho dimenticato come si parla inglese bene, ma certe cose ho iniziato a fare pure quando parlavo in inglese.
@@a.sarnelli Hai ragione, a me succede con i parenti di Roma... e bastano 10 minuti che comincio a parlare una specie romanesco... 🤣
@@paolocarpi4769 e pure succede al mio italiano. Più che parlo con i miei parenti, più il mio italiano neutro prende una cadenza dialettale. All’improvviso mi scappa un “assai” e “come” diventa “comme” 🤣
@@a.sarnelli siamo spacciati... 😆
I´m Dutch and these rules all feel like a warm bath to me. Others didn´t come as easy and intuitively though.
I would be interested in knowing what features of English seem strangest to a native speaker of Dutch.
How about making this into a series, like extend the theme of this video on different language groups such as Slavic, Fenno-Ugric and such things
Love this!
Thanks! Stuff like this is helpful to me as an English tutor and editor. Since I'm a native speaker, I just know when something is wrong but in some cases it can be hard to explain why it's wrong. Now I understand why missing articles or unnecessary articles is an issue in many of the papers I review!
Ok... capitalization in other languages is something I Never knew. I would never have known unless you shared this. Languages is strange but fun.
I think, the Germans just capitalize whatever they want.
10:28 I'm native Spanish and this happened to meeeee lmao
In an English course I had, my grammar professor was like "Ah yeah, just add -ed on regular verbs."
Then, my vocabulary professor witnessed our pronunciation all messed up xD
He even went out of his way to explain to us that the pronunciation of -ed sometimes was muted, sometimes not, and gave us some examples as well as answering some questions we had in regards to pronunciation
If S is voiceless, as in "kissed", then so is the D. If S is voiced as in "praised", then the D is also voiced.
I don't know if Italian speakers fall into the same trap, but a common one for Spanish speakers occurs when making past tense constructions with more than one verb. "He forgot to tell you" becomes "he forgot to told you", "I didn't say that" becomes "I didn't said that", etc.
Nobody would say "I forgot to told you". I'm a native Spanish speaker and we say "me olvidé de decirte" decirte isn't the past tense of the verb decir (to say/tell). In the second case you're right.
In poetry we sometimes will say praise-ed to make everything fit in meter... Just to be confusing
The S in praised is vocalized, so it's a Z sound, which is why the D is vocalized. When the D is not vocalized, so a T, is when the letter before is also not vocalized like missed.
English has a bunch of vocalized and unlocalized letter pairings: f and v, s and z, k and g, t and d, p and b; also, th and th.
Small "nitpick" if you will, I believe it should be voiced and unvoiced. If a sound becomes unvoiced then it gets devoiced.
Here’s a little grammar joke I think is kind of funny and some Italian natives laugh when I’ve said it.
Native Italian speaker with English as a second language but with a strong Italian accent:
“I went to the diner this morning and I order eggs and two piece toast, but when the waitress bring my food, she only bring me one piece, so I say, ‘I want two piece.’ She say, ‘The restroom is behind you.’ I say, ‘No you don’t understand. I want two piece on my plate.’ She say, ‘You better not piece on your plate you sonama beacha.’”😂
Holy crap. As an English native I'm sorry lol. Super interesting and is kind of a throw back to early grade school English.
I would also mention the Z/S difference when it comes to Italian and Spanish speakers especially, mostly because in Italian it's usually closer to a TS sound, and therefore they often struggle with the vibrated S sound that is the actual Z in English, on top of that switching the s with a z can often result in a different word in English and I've yet to meet an Italian student who doesn't struggle with close and cloze
I'm a native English speaker and every time I see something like this it makes me glad I don't have to learn it as a second language.
I study Spanish and I think it would be cool to see the flip side of this.
English speakers struggle a great deal with grammatical gender, the subjunctive, some tenses like imperfect vs. simple past and of course articles. The subjunctive is so important and common in Spanish that making a mistake when using it instantly gives you away as a non-native speaker. It's intuitive to us, but if your native language doesn't have it, you're bound to make a lot of mistakes until you master it.
@Illyasviel von Einzbern very true. I try to just remember the article like it's a part of the word itself to help with noun gender. Especially with the ones that might be confusing like "la mano." I'm working on the subjunctive. I recognize it when I see or hear it, but I don't always know when I should use it.
Thank you for your response and que tengas un buen día.
Being an english teacher on italki, I can relate to these experiences. I've seen these mistakes when I'm teaching romance speakers.
But I'm curious how would you approach getting your students to use articles correctly? Should they study the rules consciously at first until it becomes automatic, or will they pick it up the longer they continue immersing in the language?
Learn consciously is a waste of time.... specially because unconsciously you have interiorized the rules of your own romance and use them...
You need hear a lot of english natives speaking and take the patterns...
Maybe when you write it could be helpful, but when you are talking you cannot stop the conversation and think about the rule... Ok you can "cheat" and training for yourself a kind of automation by repetition after you has learnt the rule... but probably this training will be shadowed by the rules of your own language if you don't renew periodically the training... You need to go to the gym periodically!!!
i think the simplest way is to explain to the student that when you hear a pronunciation mistake, you will correct them, then they repeat the word correctly and continue talking. hearing and repetition are best, in my opinion, and a short correction avoids losing time explaining an “exception.”
I'm sure it's a combination of both. At least it was for me. Like you need both fuel and oxidizer to start a fire. You need to know enough of the rules to understand and be understood by natives. Once you get there, the rest is on rails.
But is it actually that difficult to learn how to use articles? "The", "a", "an", that's it.
a - for singular general nouns that start with a consonant
an - for singular general nouns that start with a vowel
the - for cases where you can place "that", "this", "these, "those" instead of an article; also for cases when something is unique
Everything else doesn't matter and will come with experience.
@@helgenlane You would think so, but not really. The usage of articles is arbitrary, so each language uses them differently. For example: the English say "I play tennis" (no article), but the French say "Je joue AU tennis" ('I play AT THE tennis' ('au' is a contraction of à + le, so there's even a preposition that's not used in English). In English, when we speak of things in a general sense, we don't use an article "I don't like big cities". The French, however, use the definite article "Je n'aime pas LES grandes villes" (I don't like THE big cities). Neither, objectively, makes more sense or is more correct to use than the other. It's just what the speakers of each languages perceive to be correct.
And that's just for people whose native language has articles. I taught English in Japan for 5 years, and they find it really hard to grasp correct pronoun usage (they mix them up resulting in amusing results like "We did my [our] homework" or "Them [Their] car is cool",), let alone articles.
I've said before that for every ten English spelling rules there are about a dozen expectations. English is my first, and only language, so some of its quirks just seem natural, though I can still recognize parts that don't totally make sense. In school I learned the "i before e except after c and sounding as a as in neighbor and weigh." The rule forgot to mention exceptions like ancient and efficient. I can also see how words like though, thought, through and thorough would be absolute nightmares for those learning English, not to mention host of words that sound the same but are spelled differently, or words that can have different meanings and pronunciations depending on how the word is used (e.g. excuse). Complicated, confusing and a total conundrum of a language, but it's kind of fun, too.
3:40 if I ain't mistaken this feature is present in AAVE, I'm talking about using "the" and the spoken plural version "them" to talk about preferences, I do often hear this in Rap, from minorities in general, for example, "I like dem cats, u know?" or "I love de bread homie". I could be mistaken tho, this is what I picked from Hip-Hop as a non-native speaker and this was the first thing I thought about when I started learning French
Your note about Asian languages applies to Finnish, amusingly enough. We have no articles in our own language, and learning English, one is puzzled why they are even there. They only serve to make the language more convoluted. Say you and a friend see a cat on the street. Think about it, is any meaning or information lost if you simply say: "I saw cat." Unless your friend suffers from some serious memory disability, he's not going to go: "What do you mean 'cat'? What cat?" The article "the" is redundant, because which other cat could you possibly be talking about.
you wouldn't really say "I saw the cat" unless you have a specific cat you're referring to. you would say "I saw a cat" or "I see a cat" to refer to a single cat that you don't recognise.
I love that you applied data analysis to this problem to improve your lessons!
English capitalization rules are weird. Of course Germans speakers tend to have a slightly different problem in that we need to learn not to capitalize all nouns like we do in German, but also not overgeneralize and make the same mistake you outline in the video. Frankly I still check for some less common cases sometimes.
2:20 The names of months also start with a capital letter. 8:04 Some countries start with "the", e.g. "The Gambia". 11:20 You _say_ "t" after a voiceless sound, "d" after a voiced sound, "id" after dental sound, and you _say_ "s" after a voiceless sound, "z" after a voiced sound, "iz" after a sibilant.
Another spanner in the machine for ED endings, BLESSED can be pronounced BLESST or BLESS-ED depending on use.
There's also words that are spelt the same, but pronounced differently (syllabic stress?) depending on if it's a verb or noun: e.g. present - gift vs present - to give. British English will also convert ED to T in some cases, such as the 'spelt' in my previous sentence; which has nothing to do with the wheat grain of the same name.
I believe the fully pronounced version is a remnant of an older pronunciation.
I'm sorry for correcting you, Mr. Urbani, but The 3 different -ed pronunciations DO NOT depend on the last letter of the written word, but the last SOUND of the SPOKEN word in its 1st form (Present). The final SOUND, not the final letter.
Good examples are: Charge, tune, change, choke, and many more (usually with a silent "e").
7:20 in Spanish, we use it the English way. We barely use articles with countries.
My native language (Bengali, an Asian language) has a lot of articles such as ti, ta, tuku, khana, khani, gulo, guli, jon etc. (the t's are retroflex consonants).
Something i've noticed with a lot of ESL speakers is that they will frequently say an English (person, man, woman) or a Chinese, Japanese, a French etc when to a native this sounds odd and isn't grammatically correct, though if you said someone who is Chinese or is French it would work. But it's understandably very confusing because you can very correctly say someone is an Italian, or is a German etc. So I don't know if it's just an evolution of English that happened in my own lifetime or if it is still considered an error.
It's also funny because certain mistakes that english speakers from various parts of the world make can sometimes be very idiomatic to specific English dialects, for example here in Scotland, at least in the Scots language and Scottish English dialects, it's common or at least was common to say 'for to (insert verb here)' which is something I notice cetain romance speakers say in English a lot.
As a native speaker, I certainly agree that kissed is pronounced "kist". However, washed is ambiguous. You could say it as "wash't" or as "wash'd" if followed by a vowel ("I washed it"), or even as "washʔ" with a glottal stop if followed by a consonant ("I washed the car"). In reality I think the sound is somewhere in between "t" and "d". It doesn't really matter because people will understand you either way 🙂
Native English speaker:
I'm pretty sure that the logic behind capitalised weekday names is that they are considered to be true names, in the sense of being a proper noun like a place's name or a person's name.
I am still learning 😃👍💯
I had two years of German in high school and went crazy conjugating. Took Spanish for a year also and had the same experience.
I'm Italian and I've been studying/using English for more than thirty years, but it seems that I still can't always remember to capitalize the days of the week and the seasons.
before the video
me: I'm proficient, this doesn't apply to me
after the video
me: ¡AUCH! ¡¡¡MI ORGULLO!!!
Thinking of the passed tenses that are pronounced as "t", it goes further. As sometimes we English (as opposed to Americans" write it like that. Such as "learnt" instead of "learned".
Exceptions and irregular forms are obstacles to anyone studying English. Might it be the craziest language of all? As a native speaker who taught ESL for several years, I'd say it's no piece of cake walk in the park! Useful upload, Noble One.
I remember trying to explain want to my Japanese students.
Want is related to wish or desire.
Can is related to ability to do.
So you can "to want" but can't "to can" unless that is a toucan.
The hard one to explain is that English does, in fact, have politeness levels. Could, would, and should all have varying degrees of directed actions and depending which one is used it is a more forceful ask on the listener which is harder to refuse.
Then you also get the can and could problem.... Could is the past of can but we do not use could in the past tense except in the passive. (You could have eaten lunch.) We use could in the present to request things…
The more I study other languages, the happier I am to speak English natively and the more respect I have for those studying it. The amount of irregularities in terms of verb conjugation and pronunciation seem like they would be borderline unfair, especially for those coming from languages with more consistency in those categories.
after norwegian english is the easiest language...
English is very simple regarding conjugation and articles and is one of the easiest languages to learn like raditicat said. As a non native english speaker I would say the difficult part about english is that the vocals never sound the same like they do in spanish (or japanese). In some languages; A, E, I, O and U are always the same. Every spanish person can read a sentence with new words that he/she never heard before and they will pronounce them correctly. That's why spelling bee are such a big thing in countries like USA but we never do that here because pronunciation is very easy compared to english.
Thank You very much for this new video ! 😊 By the way , it would be really useful to make a video, about technics / methods for learning languages , that really works ( or are more effective , then others ). ( Not including - living in particular country 😅😅😅 . Because it's quite obvious ) Thank You in advance ! 😊
11:44 I'm not a native speaker but never made these mistakes. I never noticed them though, thanks for the fun examination. Brilliant content as always mate, looking forward to part two!
One mistake that a lot of people make is not to put full stops at the ends of sentences.
"I never noticed them, though. Full stop. New sentence. Thanks for the thing. Brilliant content as always, mate. Full stop. New sentence. Looking forward to part two!"
Could you make a video about learning italian/Spanish/Portuguese as a native from one of the three? As a native Spanish speaker I feel I can understand tons of Portuguese and italian and would be “easy” to learn them
Apparently it should, but I guess our issue with it would be to remember that some similar words (sometimes equal) have completely different meaning. Another thing I remember is that sometimes it's hard to remember what is not the language you'll learning. As example Portuguese and Spanish are so alike it's hard to remember that some words do not exist in spanish while other words are exatly the same.
I absolutely did not notice the -ED issue!
I can’t imagine how my japanese friends learn about that , i think i have to ask them now.
A Polish friend of mine often says "buyed" instead of "bought".
e.g. "I buyed some things."
He knows this is wrong, but doesn't always remember that whilst speaking. I expect it's to to him learning English following that "add ed rule".
Saw would be another one.
Sawed and sought are both correct respectively, but are not remotely interchangeable.
Dear Metatron,
I've been trying to sing along to opera and Italian songs, but have noticed it gets tricky when a word ending with a vowel is followed by a word beginning with a vowel. I've surmised that you're supposed to drop one of those vowel sounds, but can't figure out which one. Would you please do a video explaining this as a native speaker? Thanks for reading if you've read this.
I'm not Metatron, but I'm bilingual (Italian and English). Would you give some examples of what you're talking about?
@@DevilMaster in a sentence like "vado avanti" (I go forward) the final ´o´ of "vado" kinda merges with the initial ´a´ of "avanti", leaving you with something like va-doa-van-ti , in my dialect we don't drop vowels, instead we say a sort of diphthong but I don't know if that's standard. This phenomenon is very important in poetry because it determines bow many syllables a verse has
You don't drop a vowel, instead you create a diphtong with the two vowels, like Cesare said above, if you need to pronounce them quickly
@@DevilMaster Like "pronto a far tutto." Is it more like "pronto far tutto?" or "pronta far tutto?"
Also "la notte e il giorno."
Looking forward to the Italian adjective video
that's funny. In Spanish when we are speaking about countries we usually drop the article. For example, we say: "Argentina es una país muy grande" but people in Argentina tend to say "La Argentina es un país muy grande". I wonder if this is an Italian influence on the Spanish spoken in Argentina.
I'd really like to see the complete list.
I am an English teacher in Spain and one of the most common mistakes I have noticed are people using for instead of to. They would say, "I go to the supermarket for buy milk". Another common mistake is adding an "E" before any word that starts with an s followed by a consonant.
One... is. Not one... are.
@@omp199 yeah, grammarly corrected it for me 🤣, my point still stands tho.
Not capitalizing nationalities and languages is the norm across Romance languages. One exception is that French does capitalize nationalities but only if they're used as nouns, not as adjectives. So you can say ''les Français aiment le vin.''
As for articles, Spanish too uses them much more than English, but one exception is countries. We don't add them to countries most of the times like Italian does. So, we'd say ''Italia es un lindo país.'' No article. But of course, in a relative clause, the article appears just like in English, ''La Italia que recuerdo ya no existe.''
If I had to point out a very common mistake when speaking English it would be collocations. Collocations are the bane of any student no matter what language you're learning and they're easily the biggest neon sign giving you away as a non-native speaker. For example, in English we make decisions and mistakes, but in Italian and Spanish we take (prendere/tomar) decisions and commit mistakes (commettere/cometer), although I think it's also possible to say fare un errore in Italian. You tell me if fare or commettere is more common for that case.
Episode 2 please!
I love languages. Thank u.
Based on the title, my first thought was that this video would be Metatron imparting us some of his dating techniques. Instead, I learned how to properly communicate with my new Italian girlfriend by overusing articles and using my hand motions to speak for me.
Looking at this video made me realize how lucky I am to have studied English since Kindergarten. It seems like an absolute nightmare to learn it as a second language as an adult.
I had an italian friend who would always use definite articles when null articles would be correct.
When I listened to the first 3 albums of Fleshgod Apocalypse I noticed a few mispronounciations. The lyrics are in English and the band is Italian. Now I know more about that. ^^
Another very common mistake (At least among my students) is to pronounce work as walk because they think the letter o is always pronounced like aw in law. Another common mistake is to mispronounce women. When I tell them that it is pronounced wimmin, they don't believe me and I have to look it up in the Cambridge dictionary and show them.
I'm gonna be really pedantic for a bit about the "if you pronounce it t, then just write it t".
Now this is something that German does as well and as a native German speaker and fluent English speaker, I do not perceive the devoiced D as a T. That is because there is still a difference between a devoiced D and a T in English and German, and that is that the T is highly aspirated.
So "missed" and "mist" are still distinguished by the aspiration at the end.
Of course when teaching the language you would just say that it's a T, but as far as the spelling, I do like for it to remain spelled out. Or spelt out? 🤔
Yes, but they are still allophones of each other in English. But yes you are right that many English t is different to voiced d
Native speaker of British English, here. This is the first time that I have seen it claimed that "missed" and "mist" are pronounced differently. If this is true, then presumably that would be a minimal pair proving that English has two distinct phonemes that are both voiceless alveolar plosives: one aspirated and one not. I do not think this is true. Citation needed.
About the articles, it is pure true.I am only realized it when I moved to Canada.I am a Portuguese speaker and I have same problems that my latins languages cousins.
As a German at some point I started capitalizing "ich" (I in German) and then one day realized that - like in Italian - it's not always capitalized in German (even though we like to capitalize words)
It's just that I use English so much in my daily life and on the internet that I am now sometimes mixing up English and German rules haha
You know you use English too often when you either forget a word in your native language or the first word that comes to mind is the English one. xD
One thing I notice pops up surprisingly often when discussing games with Europeans is the use of opposite of a bonus being a “malus” instead of a “penalty”. It appears in the posts of people who otherwise write perfectly.
This is very simple to explain: in latin, "malus" is the opposit of "bonus", so it's easy to use it instead of "penalty". In Italy (I don't know if it's the same anywhere else) we even have a car insurance clause called "bonus-malus" (if you don't cause any accident, you will pay less, if you do you will pay more), so the pairing of the two words is sort of ingrained in our brain.😅
The first reminds me of Scottish Gaelic. I never thought about it before but I've never seen "mi" capitalized in Gàidhlig
Also the part about article. Some countries use an article, like Scotland doesn't, so it's just "Alba", but Greece does, so it's "a' Ghrèig"
One main reason English speakers will never consider this is the notion of grammar, such as the parts of a verb were never taught until learning a foreign language, this was often not until at least 11 year old and this usually just a smidgen of French.
Well You can see The Queen Mary.It's a docked shop museum.Just to add to the confusion.It's sister ship was indeed The Queen Elizabeth."Can" and "want" are simply based on conditions.I can do something,if nothing prevents it.I want to do something expresses a desire which may or may not be possible.They are kind of not the same thing to someone who is a native speaker.But can I do something adds another layer of difficulty since one may either be asking permission of someone else or asking oneself if one has whatever is required.
I knew my native tongue was hard, but I didn’t think it was this hard. Makes Russian class look easy…
As a dislexic native English speaker I can totally agree that our language is bazaar. Trying to remember all the abstract granularity to the spelling system is effectively impossible for me unless I backtrack the history of the word to figure out the most likely rules and exceptions to apply.
English, where regularity is the exception.
Amazing what I take for granted as a native English speaker!
I've used English as a second language (with roughly equal fluency) to Norwegian for over thirty years, and the Big Thing that still trips me up, I suppose, is figuring out what the plural of an unfamiliar noun is...
Simply put for every Rule one finds in usage of the English Language, there is an exception to the Rule. About a month ago, I was at a local university library and found myself in the English Language section. A lot of dust covered books there, dating back to the early 1900's of how the English Language was used back then. The same could be said when viewing other foreign language books of other languages in nearby sections. Which is why, when I teach English, I always start out with the students, telling them a story about the history of English and how it came to be some 1500 years ago.
I have one heavy burning question in my heart. A bunch actually. It is regarding Romanization or transliteration of foreign writing systems. I initially stumbled upon it with Japanese. Recently with the war in Ukraine I saw many people trying to pronounce Romanized names of the cities from the map. I know Cyrillic somewhat from living in Latvia so I immediately noticed discrepancies between what was written and how people read those names. I was kind of confused when I saw people where expecting these Romanized transliterations to be read as English. When I tried to research information about Romanization it seems like there is also many standards like in Japanese there is Hepburn and Shiki, in Ukrainian there is British, French and German. Yet these systems are nothing like English. Is there a way to approach this issue? Do we need so many standards of Romanisation. What about IPA? Do we need both IPA and Romanization? Wouldn’t it be better if in any topic of foreign countries who’s script is based of Latin alphabet we pronounce names Romanized as default, if we are not sure, rather than English as English is not phonetic? I mean only in worst case scenario, when for what ever reason content creator hasn't found pronunciations. How do we make sure people know when names are Romanized?
While I'm glad English is my native language, I fully admit that it's a stupid language. 😅 The two consistent rules in English is that all proper nouns are capitalized in writing, and that "a" is used when the next word starts with a consonant sound, and "an" is used when the next word starts with a vowel sound.
One thing that I always find amusing when my Finnish friends speak English, they sometimes get confused when to use the articles, since Finnish has no articles at all, so they'll use them in places where they shouldn't be, or vice versa. And a pronunciation quirk that one Finn I know has is that he'll sometimes pronounce the letter V as a W (he says "Wideo" instead of "Video"), because those two letters are both pronounced "V" in Finnish. I don't have any problems with it though because I think it's adorable.
4:15 You could make a song out of that!!
You probably know the following poems: 1) The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité & 2) The English Lesson by Richard Krogh. Don't show them to your pupils or they might become frustrated. 🥴
As a native English speaker, I always get a kick out of non-native speakers and their observations about how English is kind of wacky. In the alleged words of science fiction author H. Beam Piper:
"English was a language invented by Norman invaders to pick up Anglo-Saxon barmaids. It retains much of this character."
I also like this quote from James D. Nicoll:
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
As a Portuguese speaker I can tell you that the points you made about capitalization also apply to Portuguese speaker.