Weather whether,
Then than,
bare bear,
Insight incite,
Hole whole,
Flower flour,
Apparently they are called homophones as in "words that sound the same but mean different things"
Is it just me or do a lot of fluent English speakers use "weary" and "wary" interchangeably? I keep hearing people saying "be weary of that" and I'm starting to think I'm the crazy one.
I had a boyfriend in uni who pronounced "wander" the same as "wonder". Drove me up the wall.
Quite possibly, but I take the view that the word "whom" is passing into history. It's still used occasionally, but I think over the coming century it'll fall out of use. If I spoke the sentence you wrote to a fellow non-posh Brit, I reckon they'd give me a damn funny look.
That's why most spelling mistakes happen, generally. Historical linguists use those kinds of errors to figure out past pronunciations from before we could record voices.
Native speakers make different mistakes as they approach it from the spoken language. Brea and brake is often confused. I would never do that as my perspective is visual.
Yep. If you see someone mix up "you're" and "your", they're probably a native speaker.
Similarly, if you hear someone make a distinction between two words that are spelt differently but typically pronounced the same, they're probably speaking English as their second language.
Yep. If you see someone mix up "you're" and "your", they're probably a native speaker.
Similarly, if you hear someone make a distinction between two words that are spelt differently but typically pronounced the same, they're probably speaking English as their second language.
ESL learn on textbooks first while natives learn by speech first, so they have no doubt how they're supposed to be spelt but they might have trouble hearing the difference
Another fun fact is due to accent and connected speech, most ESL cannot actually understanding every word in a sentence. Most of times we just guess which word it is. Although there/they're/their sounds similar, but the spelling and word classes are distinguishable so it is really easy to guess which one it is.
I know the difference but that doesn't mean I always use the correct one in a sentence. My brain is fighting the idea that we need three different spellings for something we can differentiate by context.
Yeah, it's simply astonishing seeing comments of native speakers saying things like ".... you're car looks...", like wtf who is a car, how they can fuck it something so simple?
It’s not because it’s difficult to understand. It’s because they have been let down by our education system and they probably stopped learning and retaining new information somewhere around 11-13 years of age.
I am not a native speaker, but I consider myself fluent enough. Recently, I had to learn how to use commas because I noticed that I never really knew how to use them lol
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u/Swervin69 1d ago
Don’t feel bad beginners, fluent speakers still don’t know how to tell their, there, and they’re apart.