r/AskEurope • u/LVGW Slovakia • 1d ago
Language Is it normal that people in your country struggle with the grammar of their own language?
After watching some political posts on Slovak Facebook I have noticed that many people commenting struggle with basic grammar concepts which are learned during the first 5 years of the basic school.
Is it also common in your country that people have problems with the grammar of their own language?
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u/Pakkazull 1d ago
A lot of Swedish people have no idea how to use the Swedish equivalent of "they/them" (de/dem) because many dialects pronounce them the same way. It's also incredibly common for people to erroneously write compound words as two separate words (särskrivning), like writing "foot ball" instead of "football".
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u/NJay289 1d ago
The last one we have in Germany as well, doing it is called a „deppenleerzeichen“ aka „idiot whitespace“
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u/AdFront8465 1d ago
Also han/honom, "I gave it to he". This is even worse.
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u/Jagarvem Sweden 1d ago
That's a misinterpretation though. The "han" you react to is not the nominative, it's the accusative. It doesn't correspond to the English "he", it corresponds to "hine". They just happen to be homonyms in Swedish.
In standard Swedish the dative (honom) became a general oblique pronoun, but that did not happen universally. It's the same reason you also hear people say "na" instead of "henne", it too derives from the old accusative.
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u/wagdog1970 Belgium 1d ago
We have similar problems with compound words in English.
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u/Dodezv 1d ago
To clarify: In spoken Swedish, the plural personal pronoun and article is pronounced "dom". (at least in the most 'standard' variety)
But in written Swedish, they had to make it complicated: the personal pronoun is written "de" in the nominative and "dem" in the accusative/oblique, and the article is always written "de". So in order to determine when to write "dem" instead of "de" (which both do not match pronunciation), you have to know a) that it is the pronoun and b) that it is oblique case, a task obviously many people fail to do.
Some dialects have different rules (and therefore have less problems).
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u/Stormvirvel Sweden 12h ago
This (I am also Swedish). I hate when people use "dom" instead of "de/dem" (they/them) even if "dom" has been officially recognized as grammaticaly correct (like why?). It looks so so ugly to me and I cringe everytime I see it. It's honestly not that hard (one way is to replace "de/dem" with "jag/mig" in a sentece, and if it's "jag" it's supposed to be "de" and if it's "mig" it's "dem".
Also sometimes imo do not know how to use åä properly and use e instead. And also särskrivning just like you said. In Swedish, words like that are almost never seperated (very few exceptions) so if you are unsure about it you should always put them together.
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u/CubistChameleon Germany 1d ago
Oh yes. Someone else mentioned political posts and I can confirm that it's become a running joke in Germany that far right social media commenters can't speak our own language.
(Russian fake accounts usually use better German, but it tends to sound stilted.)
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u/CaptainPoset Germany 1d ago
(Russian fake accounts usually use better German, but it tends to sound stilted.)
... or uses direct translations of Russian terms which don't work like that in non-Russian.
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u/MerlinOfRed United Kingdom 19h ago
It's the same in English.
I love how the Russian propaganda always complains about the Anglo-Saxons when the last Anglo-Saxon regime ended rather abruptly in 1066.
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u/martinbaines Scotland & Spain 1d ago
The running joke about the far right applies in the UK too. A common phrase from them is:
"We wunt are cuntry back"
A mix of bad grammar (confusing "are" for "our") and bad spelling. But hey, two words right out of five is not too bad.
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u/ContributionSad4461 Sweden 1d ago
Yes. Young people have been infected by English and sometimes use the wrong syntax which is annoying and they don’t understand what subject/object is and how the pronouns change accordingly. Even worse is the way that they’ll directly translate English words or expressions without realising that those words or expressions already mean something else in Swedish. For example, ask out = bjuda ut (invite out) in Swedish but you’ll see people translating directly into ”fråga ut” which means interrogate. You’ll see people making posts on Swedish Reddit like “How can I interrogate a girl I like?” and I’m so tempted to just write “please don’t, it’ll be weird”.
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u/Quietuus United Kingdom 1d ago
Most European nations have literacy rates above 99%, but what literacy means in this case is simply being able to write something like "My name is Bob. I work on a building site." (spelling optional). *Functional* literacy is quite a bit lower; normally somewhere between 70% and 80%.
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u/DanGleeballs Ireland 23h ago edited 5h ago
English colleagues saying, “I seen” and, “I done” kills me. Immediately think less of them. I had a solicitor (lawyer) colleague who said this . It was embarrassing in front of clients who noticed it too.
You were corrected on that in primary 3 when you were 8 years old, how are you still getting it wrong?
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u/kdamo 15h ago
Ah here that’s way more common in Ireland than in Uk (although I can only use London as reference)
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u/DanGleeballs Ireland 15h ago
I'm talking about working in London and not Irish people, but I know that some Irish people from Northern Ireland in particular make the same faux pas.
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u/Alarow France 1d ago
Oh yes, so much
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u/Feeling-Size4723 1d ago
I see French speakers misspelling so many of their own words all the time on social media😭
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u/wagdog1970 Belgium 1d ago
As someone trying to learn French as an adult, I love this so much.
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u/NipplePreacher Romania 1d ago
As someone trying to practice french by reading what they write on social media, it terrifies me.
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u/tenebrigakdo Slovenia 1d ago
We were actually warned in class that almost nobody in France can actually speak the literal language we were learning.
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u/typingatrandom France 1d ago
We also can't write it properly, mind you
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u/tenebrigakdo Slovenia 1d ago
Yeah I figured, spelling is obnoxious in French.
I will need to dive back into French (I haven't practiced for a decade) for my next job and I was planning to look at French reddit to get in contact with the language, but I'm reconsidering now.
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u/typingatrandom France 1d ago
Spelling is obnoxious, to the point we've had some sort of national wide dictation a few years ago with the most challengingly difficulties and obnoxious words in it (this started back in second half of 19th century, when author of Carmen, Prosper Mérimée, wrote a convoluted dictation for the amusement of emperor Napoleon 3rd and his court, the Emperor himself made 70 mistakes iirc). And our grammar is madly complicated and affects spelling. Plus lots of exceptions.
Please come nonetheless and be welcome
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u/0ctopusRex 1d ago
To be fair, Louis-Napoléon wasn't a first language speaker of French, and all his life he was speaking French with a strong German accent.
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u/zen_arcade2 Italy 1d ago
Yes. Italian has a fuckload of homophones that are also among the most common words.
o/ho, a/ha, ce/c’è, anno/hanno, ne/né/n’è, etc.
Now picture an uneducated person get “ce n’è” right - they have like 1/6 chance.
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u/outlanderfhf Romania 1d ago
Doesnt seem very hard to grasp ce n’è, but thats because my language has a similar concept, but its a hyphen, and the purpose is to stick 2 elements rather than show a vowel drops
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u/Za_gameza Norway 1d ago
Yes
Many people, especially younger, replace henne (her) with hun (she), and ham (him) with han (he). Han has become acceptable in both situations, but I still think it sounds wrong.
Ex. Jeg besøkte henne, men hun var opptatt (I visited her, but she was busy) turns into Jeg besøkte hun, men hun var opptatt (I visited she, but she was busy.
Many people also struggle with å and og because they sound practically the same. They usually replace og with å. Å- before verbs in the infinitive, og - and
Ex. Buss og tog --> buss å tog, Ola og Kari --> Ola å Kari
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u/President_Pyrus Denmark 1d ago
Many people also struggle with å and og because they sound practically the same. They usually replace og with å. Å- before verbs in the infinitive, og - and
People do the same with "at" and "og" in Danish. They are practically the same words so it does make sense. It drives me insane though.
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u/lilputsy Slovenia 1d ago
Yes, very much. I think a contributing factor is that no one speaks literal Slovenian so when they write, it just comes out aweful. A lot of people seem to have trouble grasping very basic things like s/z (with) or k/h (to).
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u/tenebrigakdo Slovenia 1d ago
OMG I forgot about the s/z thing when writing my post. It doesn't help that some dialects don't even use them and make do with iz.
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u/LieutenantFuzzinator 1d ago
It's also important to note that something that would be considered a grammar mistake in formal language is sometimes actually just standard grammar rule of that particular dialect (lack of dual in primorje comes to mind). We're just really not used to seeing spoken language written, since everyone gets taught written language separately.
It's kinda wild just how different written and spoken Slovene are. And we all just accept the fact that we write in a basically different langauge (especially if your native dialect is very different from the standard).
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u/577564842 Slovenia 1d ago
Nothing compensates for
- not knowing of genitive
- not knowing of double
with the exception of some (SW) dialects where double plural is used in place of double feminine
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u/AirportCreep Finland 1d ago
Yes, incredibly so. I can't spell either, but have the excuse of never receiving any formal language training in Finnish having grown up only speaking it at home and with friends when visiting Finland (grew up abroad). Finnish is essentially two languages, written and spoken. A lot of people just write spoken Finnish which means that when they actually need to write real written Finnish, they mess up grammar.
In Swedish I believe the most common mistake is to mix up de, dem and det (they, them, , that/it). I do it all the time. Dem is also often written as it pronounced, dom, which is wrong. But they're probably going to update the language in future so that dom becomes the correct spelling as dom doesn't make any sense at all. But Swedish is difficult, there are so many exceptions to the grammar rules that sometimes even native speakers mess them up. Some words differ also between Swedish and Finland-Swedish which may also cause some confusion.
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u/disneyvillain Finland 1d ago
Well, you can totally write dom but it's often seen as colloquial (talspråk). The general recommendation now though is that it's better to use dom than to use de/dem wrongly.
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u/CommercialAd2154 1d ago edited 1d ago
You’ll hear people say ‘you/they was’, ‘if I was’, you’ll see people get there/their/they’re mixed up as well as a number of spellings (because English is a mess of a language lol), nothing that impedes communication though
Edit: ‘could/should of’ instead of ‘could/should have’ or ‘could/should’ve’ (the latter of which is almost homophonic with ‘could/should of’)
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u/CommercialAd2154 1d ago
My favourite misspelling in English is of a loan word from Italian, sometimes you’ll see people spell ‘prima donna’ (which in English means someone who’s temperamental, precious and arrogant, often used in football for players who look good but go down too easily and don’t like being kicked around) ‘pre Madonna’ (which would be a homophone in English), I like the implication that artists were all temperamental twats before Madonna came along lol
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u/lovesick-siren Greece 1d ago
Yes, very much so in Greece. Many Greeks struggle with orthography in particular, because Greek spelling is notoriously complex and irregular, since the language preserves a highly conservative, ancient writing system that doesn’t correspond neatly to modern pronunciation. We essentially still write in a historical spelling that reflects several layers of linguistic development.
The education system has also been deteriorating for decades now and it’s honestly just a joke nowadays. The combination of underfunding, outdated teaching methods and a general linguistic lethargy and extreme reduction of vocabulary (thanks social media and anglicisms!) is a death sentence for the Greek language.
It’s not really that people don’t know their own language (even though the grammar can be so complex that I often hear mistakes in spoken language as well…), but the orthography is unforgiving and the system hasn’t given them the tools to learn it properly.
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u/scarletohairy 1d ago
Interesting. And sadly, I’m not feeling hopeful about the future in this subject.
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u/Chezaranta 1d ago
Happens in every language I think. In Spanish is a common joke to say "if they distinguish between there is (hay), there ( ahí) and ouch (ay) keep them forever".
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u/lellyjoy Romania 1d ago
Yes, and it's usually the ones who declared themselves patriots and complain that education is not what it used to be. Irony is lost on them.
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u/t-licus Denmark 1d ago
I think most languages have some aspect that native speakers mess up.
For Danish, a prominent one is hans/sin, which is hard to explain in English (which is probably why people mess it up these days), but basically is a way to distinguish between “he took his (own) hat” and “he took his (some other guy’s) hat.” Loads of people use the second one when they mean the first one.
A lot of these mistakes are things that only show up in writing, like using capitals and possessive apostrophes the way they are used in English (in Danish, “Father’s Bench” should be “Fars bænk” but is often written “Far’s Bænk”) or breaking up what should be compound words in ways that change the meaning of the sentence. All of these are mistakes people make because they apply English rules to Danish, but we’ve got a few home-grown mistakes as well. The most infamous is the dreaded af/ad distinction, two words that are pronounced the exact same in the spoken language but convey motion in different directions when written (throwing something out of the window is “ud af vinduet” but driving along the road is “hen ad vejen.)
I’m actually not completely sure I got the last one correct, that’s how common it is to mess it up…
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u/Perkomobil 1d ago
The first sentence ("he took his (own) hat") would be "han tog up sin hatt" in Swedish, yes? But I imagine most people write "han tog up hans hatt"?
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u/t-licus Denmark 1d ago
Yeah, it’s the same in Danish. “Sin” is his own, “hans” is someone else’s. But it’s hardly ever used properly anymore, so the distinction is probably on its way out.
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u/Perkomobil 1d ago
Låter de likadant på danska, eller? Hur tar man fel på hans och sin? Helt olika ord, ju!
Smh (skakar mitt huvud) engelskan tar över.
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u/t-licus Denmark 1d ago
Det lyder fuldstændigt forskellige, folk siger bare “hans” i begge tilfælde fordi, ja, engelsk. Samme årsag som folk ikke kan finde ud af at bruge sammensatte ord (undskyld, sammen satte ord 🙄) og bruger apostroffer hvor de ikke hører til.
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u/President_Pyrus Denmark 1d ago
Når det kommer til sammensatte ord hjælper det os heller ikke, at ordbøger på mobiltelefoner er notorisk dårlige til dem, og næsten altid prøver at dele dem op.
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u/money_dont_fold 1d ago
Du har ret, det er egentlig ret interessant at i ikke laver samme fejl i Sverige. Til gengæld roder vi ikke rundt i han/ham(honom).
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u/Jagarvem Sweden 1d ago
Att vissa dialekter använder "han" där andra (och standard skriftspråket) skulle sätta honom är egentligen inte för att man blandar ihop det med nominativformen alls.
Det är för att man har kvar ackusativ han (inte dativ honom). Samma dialekter använder ofta även ackusativ "na", istället dativens henne, av samma anledning.
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u/Sqeakydeaky 1d ago
"Han ligger i sengen med sin kone" is fine.
"Han ligger i sengen med hans kone" gets you beat up.
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u/AppleDane Denmark 1d ago
Also compound words, since spell checks can't have a base of all possible combinations of elements.
Which is sometimes rather amusing. Examples:
"Fadøl" = draft beer
"Fad øl" = stale beer"Ældrebolig" = Assisted housing for the elderly
"Ældre bolig" = Aged houseI've seen both used.
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u/Pop_Clover Spain 1d ago
I'd say in my country people struggle mostly with spelling and punctuation. Sometimes to an amazing degree that makes me think that a lot of people just don't care, not that they aren't able to write properly. Others you can tell that they speak a dialect that makes them confuse the spelling because they use the same sound for different letters (mostly people with seseo).
There are also grammar mistakes, even some that are very prevalent because they are used wrong in oral speech and people just write what they say, like using the infinitive as imperative ("ir" instead of "id"), or laismo... But I'd say they are less common.
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u/Zen_the_Jester Poland 1d ago
Yes. It's usually a kids issue, but adults also have problems with:
when to chose between: u/ó, rz/ż, h/ch when writting
writing "sz" instead of rz/ż - they spell how they hear it the same with f/w in words
when to write ą/om at the end of plural nouns
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u/AgeAbiOn France 1d ago
Oh yes. And when it comes to gender and number agreement, even people thinking they don't make mistakes actually do some mistakes.
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u/Christoffre Sweden 1d ago
Something I often see is people splitting compounds.
In Swedish, you cannot have two separate nouns in a row (with only rare exceptions, such as certain loanwords). For example:
doghouse = a house for a dog (noun + noun)
dog house = a dog can house something (noun + verb)
Autocorrect on phones does not really grasp this type of grammar, so the author’s own grammatical shortcomings always shine through.
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u/tenebrigakdo Slovenia 1d ago
There are some typical mistakes a lot of people make. Using accusative instead of genitive in when negating in a sentence, using a wrong connecting word between clauses because it sounds fancier (this is a relatively new one, it didn't use to happen when I was a kid), and simply skipping commas. Slovenian is slightly insane about commas, so I can't really fault people about that.
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u/frusciantefango England 1d ago
Yep. I think a big contributing factor is the internet - in the past people read mainly books, magazines, newspapers, all of which were edited by someone reasonably competent before printing. You'd see spelling and grammatical mistakes mainly on things like chalkboard menus in a pub or sale signs outside a shop. So in general people were consuming standard English as the biggest portion of what they read.
Now, we can (and do) read endless content online that's posted by anyone - so common mistakes such as using the wrong their / there / they're or the misspelling & failed autocorrect of 'definitely' giving us 'defiantly' are seen multiple times a day. Kids will read the correct version once at school that day and the incorrect version 4 times online that evening.
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u/Hullu__poro 1d ago
Yes. What's interesting: The more far-right the people are, the more they struggle with their own language.
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u/DanGleeballs Ireland 23h ago
The further right on the spectrum you go aligns with lower levels of education level attained.
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u/zsebibaba Hungary 1d ago
no. people use their own language. accidentally they make mistakes (you will recognize mistakes as those are not repeated) or they have their own dialect or a regional dialect. as for spelling sure, some people are not aware of the standardized guidelines that other people have created. bummer, good thing it is just a guideline, most "rules" originating in a historical phase of the language development.
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u/scarletohairy 1d ago
Yes, thru usage language is mutable. For example, I can’t be arsed to spell through and prefer to shorten this particular word. But! As someone who intakes written legal statements regarding workplace incidents, I believe there are a lot of people who struggle with writing correctly when they wish to express something that matters to them.
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u/louellay France 1d ago
When scrolling reddit, youtube etc... it is RARE to see a full comment with no spelling or grammar mistakes.
Many people make mistakes when speaking as well.
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u/Brainwheeze Portugal 1d ago
A lot of people conjugate verbs incorrectly and/or don't use the proper tenses. The elderly have an excuse because people like my grandparents only had school up until the end of the fourth grade, those being the only compulsory years during the dictatorship period. But even those born after that period struggle with that.
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u/sasheenka Czechia 1d ago
Czechs sometimes struggle with i/y and s/z in certain words
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u/cototudelam 1d ago
Ten tvůj nick mi něco připomíná. Nejsi náhodou na AO3/Tumblr?
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u/sasheenka Czechia 1d ago
🫣 nooo na tumblr jsem byla dlouhé roky aktivní v různých fandomech, hlavně jsem dělala gif sety a fotomanipulace, na ao3 mám jen dva krátké počiny.
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u/Londonsw8 1d ago
British living in Portugal and trying to learn. Went to Water company and spoke to a Portuguese young man there who responded to my bad Portuguese in English. He said learning English in school was easier for him than Portuguese grammer (his native language), made me feel better about learning Portuguese bringing me to my knees!!!
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u/toniblast Portugal 1d ago
Well, English grammar is very simple. Portuguese grammar is much more complex, and since Portuguese is our native language, it is taught more in-depth, and there are many things that you learn that you don't need to know to speak well on a daily basis.
Everyone will make mistakes. Just don't give up, and good luck learning Portuguese.
English might have easier grammar, but spelling in English is very hard. I can't write in English without making spelling mistakes.
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u/Jagarvem Sweden 1d ago
English grammar is kind of deceptively simple; much like its spelling, the grammar is really quite irregular. And it has a bunch of weird things. Like for something as simple as negating a verb, you can't just insert a negating adverb like in the vast majority of languages. Instead you must render the main verb infinite, insert and conjugate an auxiliary "do", and then negate that instead. Except since it's English there are of course exceptions, and some verbs are a-ok to negate directly. And some are ok in certain contexts.
English is however very forgiving, so if you do make mistakes it'll usually not affect communication much (unlike many languages where you must nail the basics to get much of anything across). It's an easy to pick up, harder to master kind of thing.
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u/harrycy Cyprus 1d ago
Laughs in η,ι,υ,οι,ει,ο,ω.
Yes. People lack correct grammar, syntax, spelling .. Basically, everything. To make matters worse, there's been a trend the past 20 years (since people started having mobile phones) that we write Greek in the Latin alphabet since it's way more convenient on a phone instead of the Greek alphabet and this has had affected people's language skills horribly.
E.g. "κάνω" -> kano
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u/VisAcquillae 1d ago
Hehe, yes! I'm old enough to remember in the early 2000s that Greeklish, which was already widely used in Internet chat rooms and forums, exploded in popularity with the advent of SMS. Most people, I remember them saying that they wanted to avoid being billed for extra text messages, and Greeklish helped make them shorter/have fewer characters. Also, given how you had to press buttons multiple times to type in certain characters, especially stress marks, writing in Greeklish was usually faster.
And then, there were also the abbreviations.
E.g.:
Greek: Καλημέρα, τι κάνεις σήμερα; Θέλω να σε δω. Πες μου αν μπορείς να βγεις. Σ' αγαπώ πολύ, φιλάκια! -> 95 characters
Greeklish: Kalimera, ti kanis simera? Thelo na se do. Pes mu an mporis na vgis. Sagapo poli, filakia! -> 89 characters
Abbreviated Greeklish (what most messages looked like): klm! tkns smr? 8elo na se do. pm an mporis na vgis. s agp poli flk! -> 67 characters
In my experience, "τέσπα"/"τέλος πάντων", has permeated the most into everyday language. Not only do people use it while talking and casually writing to each other, I've even seen it slip in professional and formal communication, or university-level homework being handed in for grading.
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u/full_and_tired Czechia 1d ago
I’d say yes. Even I can feel myself getting worse since I graduated high school and don’t have regular grammar lessons and practice anymore. I’d say people have the most difficulty with punctuation (guilty) and distinguishing between when to write y/i,sometimes s/z at the beginning of a word.
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u/TallCoin2000 Portugal 1d ago
In Portugal we had our own way if writing and spelling which differed from Brazilian Portuguese, and those of Portuguese Speaking Countries. We were the OG Portuguese. Well, about 20y ago we had an orthographic agreement. And now we all spell incorrectly and in a garbage way, that people like me when we return to Portugal and you sometimes read certain things in pt, you're like " who wrote this"? I'll probably get ripped apart here, many people will say that its better now! I disagree, bring Pessoas back!
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u/Confidenceisbetter Luxembourg 1d ago
Yes because my language is barely ever used in written format. Native people speak it or they use it in text messages, but that’s not really a good way to learn or keep up with correct grammar.
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u/Haestein_the_Naughty Norway 1d ago
Not struggle per se, but many write in dialect
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u/Perkomobil 1d ago
Writing in dialect can be very cute in informal texts, imho. Most proper dialects have died out in Sweden to due a France-style "stop speaking patois"-mindset in the 1800s, save for a few broad regional things.
I speak Helsingian Swedish (regional accent with some dialectal things). If I was to write in dialect, it'd look something like this:
Å skriva på diałekt kan jö va' kuł i mer oseriösa texter, tycke jag schełv. Di flesta ordentliga diałekterna har dött ut i Sværje på grund åv en Fransk-inspirerad "sluta snacka patois"-mentalitet på artenhundra (1800)-tałet, förutom vissa breda regionala saker.
Ł - 'thick' l. Æ - tiny more 'e'-sounding ä. Hard to explain.
Both my parents are southerners, but maternal grandparents are from a small town on the Gästrikland-Uppland borders, so some similarities.
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u/TheVojta Czechia 1d ago
Interesting to see Ł there, I thought only some Slavic languages used that.
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u/sultan_of_gin Finland 1d ago
Absolutely. It’s made worse now by people consuming so much media in english so it’s very common these days for people to only know some words in english.
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u/agrammatic Cypriot in Germany 1d ago
Depends on what you mean with "grammar". That's a loose term.
If you mean standard spelling, that's pretty common in languages where there's multiple ways to spell the same sounds. Definitely a big issue for Greek, with it's half a dozen ways to spell the sound /i/, for example.
If you mean inflection and conjugation and sentence structures, that's pretty common when the standard register of the language is significantly removed from the natively acquired rules of the language. This is not such a big issue for Greek speakers who learn Standard Greek natively in most of Greece, but Cypriot Greek speakers who only learn Standard Greek in school can struggle.
If you mean punctuation rules, I think this is a universal struggle. In most languages punctuation rules are not top of mind for anyone who isn't a professional writer or an obsessive nerd.
If you mean coherence and writing style, I think this is also a universal struggle for everyone for whom writing is not a core professional skill. Ever since my career change, I also feel that my writing style became more oral and therefore unclear.
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u/HenryCDorsett Germany 1d ago
dem harald sein Auto ist größer wie deins!
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u/HenryCDorsett Germany 1d ago
there is a weirdly high amount of random people with no connection to these dialects, that randomly choose to include these two things from different dialects, but nothing else....
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u/MindingMine Iceland 1d ago
Grammar, spelling, punctuation - people have problems with all of it. Very noticeable in any comment section, e.g. Facebook, Reddit. We love to complain about it too - it's like a national sport, generally with prescriptivists on one side and descriptivists on the other.
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u/Grouchy_Fan_2236 Hungary 1d ago
Yes - and this should surprise absolutely nobody. It's a difficult language.
It is common to mock and make fun of less educated people's social media posts that are full of grammar issues. The bottom 10% includes a lot of minorities and early school-leavers that struggle with grammar a lot.
So there's kind of norm that you should get at least ~98% of your words right before people will think you just made a mistake rather than assuming you are illiterate to a certain degree.
Everyone has different writing styles and some words may be correct in multiple forms, however the core of the language is pretty much the same regardless of dialects.
Also - built-in spell checkers in browsers handle Hungarian language quite well. It was also one of the first languages to be included in Microsoft Office - as far as I can remember I already used it in 2000 and worked like a charm. So those of us working in a tech-intensive environment are much more likely to become Grammar Nazis and set a much higher standard than what was the average in the 20th century.
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u/Captain_Gestan 1d ago
In Germany, one might think the media have agreed to reject the genitive case. Furthermore, more and more prepositions and idioms are being misused. This is particularly shocking because there are repeated discussions about immigrants, refugees, etc., finally learning proper German. But what's the point if not even the official media speaks good German? And what's the excuse? Language changes, that's all the people in question can think of. Speaking bad German because language is alive and changing. Logic in 2025.
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u/BroSchrednei Germany 1d ago
I mean the Genitiv literally already died out in most German dialects, and was kinda artificially brought back by everyone learning Luthers German in the 1800s-1900s (Martin Luther happened to be from Central East Germany, where the Genitiv had survived).
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u/billwood09 1d ago
Also, as a second language, Germans always act like they are bad at English but good god you guys/gals write so much more competently than most Americans.
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u/Gaeilgeoir_66 1d ago
If you mean the official literary grammar, of course many people struggle with it.
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u/-Liriel- Italy 1d ago
Some people, yes.
It's not common though.
It is common to not use perfect literary grammar, but I expect the average person to know the difference between "è" and "e".
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u/Reasonable_Run_5529 1d ago
Married to a Spaniard, and lived in spain for 6/7 years. The average Spaniard cannot spell. Zero Fs given and they always think they're right. What can possibly go wrong
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u/Subject4751 Norway 1d ago
Norwegian has 2 written forms. "Bokmål" and "Nynorsk". People who 'main' one (which is most of us) will often struggle with the other.
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u/FollowingRare6247 Ireland 1d ago
Oh, all the time. It somewhat depends on what rules you’re applying, there’s different dialects and they have their own peculiarities; but there are general things like noun cases that people can mess up with. You also cannot have Irish without the copula, yet it’s commonly a problem for people.
Generally the language is easy to spell once you’ve got a grasp of the sounds, but sometimes people forget the accent. It can make the difference between eating cake, or shit…or calling a girl by her name, or calling her vomit.
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u/HumanFromEstonia 1d ago
🇪🇪 Estonian is very difficult, I admit that. But the huge amount of compound word mistakes like (split apart shows ownership of the item, compounded shows type of item), spelling plural wrong (-si is not the plural signifier, the -D in the end is), switching out similar sounding words (järgi vs järele) with slightly different meanings - it's endless. Don't get me started on commas, seems like nobody even knows basic sentence structure anymore. Then we get to misspelling foreign loan words for no reason like "prominantne" when the original word is prominent - why the A in the middle???
And the anglicisms of directly translating word for word in your head expressions that don't exist in our language irks me. Expressions like "päeva lõpus" (we don't use "at the end of the day" as a saying, makes me question what specific day is the speaker referring to), "kelle poolt loodud" (unnecessary, in english would sound like "made by BY someone". Our noun cases already show the BY so the word "poolt" is pointless), "tänu millele" (thanks to - don't thank bad things for happening and creating awful situations). Correct versions would be "lõppude lõpuks" (To end all ends), "kelle loodud" (made by whom), "mille tõttu" (due to).
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u/vikocorico France 1d ago
As a French I see this happening literally everyday, spoken and written, it's pretty common.
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u/SquashDue502 22h ago
Convinced nobody learned the difference between your/you’re, and then/than, and there/their/they’re.
Absolutely dying seeing social media posts like “Than their you’re brother” or something brain dead like that lol
Especially the contractions because one is obviously 2 words squished together (duh the apostrophe) 💀
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u/trtmrtzivotnijesmrt Croatia 1d ago
Many Croats do not know how to differentiate č and ć in all of the words, as well as ije/je. Myself included, I will never learn it for every word. Also, word stress rules. My God, I do not stand a chance there. Croatian grammar is obnoxious, what can I say.
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u/bubeethecat 1d ago edited 1d ago
I was born in Croatia, I'm half Croatian and half Italian but I did all my studies in Italy so Italian is my first language. I'm embarrassed every time I have to text someone in croatian (thankfully mostly family...). Even my keyboard is confused with č/ć and ije/je and gives me both options... At least I'm not the only one...🙈
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u/Unusual-Lemon4479 1d ago
Autocorrect and dictionary on your phone and laptop is also contributing to this, as you don’t have to write the word properly or even the full word for a pop up to appear with it.
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u/CiderDrinker2 Scotland 1d ago edited 17h ago
Two generations of people in the UK, schooled in the last three decades of the 20th century, were told by progressive teachers that there is no such thing as correct grammar. That tendency has been reversed (at least in England, less so in Scotland), but effects of that complete professional dereliction of duty are still with us.
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u/AllIWantisAdy Finland 1d ago
Biggest problem for people seem to be the combound words. Then there are the even worse people who have managed to get into adulthood with a very lacking sense of writing, be it use of punctuation or lack of spaces and/or capital letters. Usually the loudest noise comes from the empty barrels, so to speak.
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u/BreadstickBear 1d ago
Yep. Proper punctuation, capitalisation, and knowing how to properly join and not join prefixes and suffixes are a huge boondoggle for opinionated but ignorant facebook nationalists. These issues seem to be typical of right wingers, although many seem to struggle with some finer points of grammar, which when pointed out they go on to blame on autocorrect, which doesn't really make things better.
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u/benny_boy United Kingdom 1d ago
English is taught here terribly in the UK, I genuinely think that the vast majority of adults have a literacy skill of < 15 years old. I have a lot of friends for whom English is a second language and almost all of them have in my opinion higher English skills than most English people I know.
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u/Kapitine_Haak Netherlands 1d ago
In linguistics this would be called deviating from the prestigious variety. Their grammar is correct, just not in line with the prescriptivist and prestigious norm. Especially in informal contacts, such as when chatting to someone or posting on Facebook, it's common to deviate from that norm. They speak in a way that's more natural to them and possibly that presents them in a certain way (like clothing)
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u/GingerPrince72 1d ago
UK is constantly “ I’m sat”, “would of” etc. More and more American style “payed”. 🤬
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u/scarletohairy 1d ago
Payed is not an “American”word. and there’s no way we would use five letters when we can only use four.
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u/GingerPrince72 1d ago
It’s not a word, it’s a misspelling that I see coming more from Americans but more and more Brits.
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u/Jagarvem Sweden 1d ago
Some may frown on its use in certain formal registers, but "I'm sat" is perfectly grammatical.
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u/GingerPrince72 1d ago
No, it isn't, it's poor grammar but has become common use, sadly.
"I'm seated" or "I'm sitting" would be correct.
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u/swedish_countryball 1d ago
A common problem with Swedish is how to use de/dem (they/them) correctly, they are both pronounced as dom so most people (natives included) get confused and just write dom
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u/Sophroniskos Switzerland 1d ago
Swiss German has no official written form. This means you can write however you like and never make spelling mistakes.
Some would write "gsung" (healthy) as "xung"; some would write "schwyz" (Switzerland) as "schwiiz" or "schwiz" and so on.
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u/FineMaize5778 1d ago
I dont have problems with the grammar of my own language, but there are certain things i simply choose to ignore, like using A instead of a after . Or using å or og in certain contexts, i just ignore all that stuff when i type on my phone for bs online. And it infuriates some people to no end.
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u/Avia_Vik France 1d ago
Yes its common especially with more complicated grammar forms or even smth simple like noun genders, natives make mistakes too
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u/jinxdeluxe 1d ago
I struggle with the grammar of every language. Grammar is the hard part, not learning the words - that's easy.
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u/InterestingTank5345 Denmark 1d ago
Oh yes. This language is not an easy one. Like is the ending: "re" or "rer"? Take your guess, because there's not really that many ways to tell and you gotta be an analytic genius to recognise it.
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u/matomo23 United Kingdom 1d ago
Older people, yes. But the UK has shot ip league tables in terms of maths and English outcomes at school in the last 10 years. So I would hope younger people are much better!
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u/Nearby_Impact6708 1d ago
Yeah, Welsh is a lot harder than English
But you also don't tend to get grammar Nazis in Welsh so much and spelling is a lot less standardized too outside of formal settings. Much more acceptable to type it as you say it and spell in a way that differs from the formal or correct way.
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u/GreatBigBagOfNope United Kingdom 1d ago
There are tens of thousands of speakers, in the Nordics and Germany and the Netherlands especially, who speak and write ours better than the majority of us
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u/Mountain-Fox-2123 I Know nothing 1d ago
I am dyslexic so i do make mistake in any language i write in even my own.
So i have no write to judge when it comes to stuff like that.
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u/Secret-Sir2633 1d ago
Yes it is commonplace, and no, it isn't acceptable. (I don't use the word "normal", because it is too ambiguous.)
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u/GoonerBoomer69 Finland 1d ago
Yes, nobody actually speaks the official written style of Finnish, so nobody is 100% proficient in it.
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u/EwelinaisMyName 1d ago
Yep, it is very common in Polish. One of the most "popular" errors are: writing "na prawdę" /should be "naprawdę"/(really/for real) and napewno /should be "na pewno"/(for sure/surely) or spelling and writing "wziąść", while it is "wziąć" (to take/get). Well, most Poles cannot speak and write Polish properly.
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u/OJK_postaukset Finland 22h ago
In some cases. One common one is using ”enään” instead of ”enää” and then just tough words in general (mostly wether some words are written together or seperate)
Mostly some people (that don’t read) lack cool vocabulary like häikäilemätön, ailahtelevainen and such
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u/LilBed023 -> 22h ago
Most mistakes relate to spelling. We have rules that determine whether a d or a t comes at the end of a verb. The catch? They sound exactly the same and the rules are nitpicky, which makes mistakes very common.
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u/Ollemeister_ Finland 20h ago
I'd say that nobody really uses the official Finnish language (kirjakieli) because it is too official. It feels too cumbersome and unemotional. Business and government institutions use that language but the normal folk speak in dialects and generally the "speaking language" (puhekieli). In puhekieli the strictest of grammar rules aren't really considered. I can personally say that when i need to use kirjakieli in emails and such i do have to put some effort into things like semicolons and punctuation in general. But you don't really run into many grammar errors in finnish aside from a few specific things since the language rrally is spoken like it's written. There aren't any special pronounciation rules or anything like that.
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u/Admirall1918 Germany 7h ago
Yes. There are even sites specifically for some mistakes: seit = since: Seit wann bist du hier? Since when are you here?
seid = are: Seid ihr alle da? Are you all here?
a different one is: https://www.dass-das.de
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u/demaandronk Netherlands 1d ago
Yes, and they cant spell either