The English language has a lot of nuances that make it tough for even native speakers to get right. People took to the internet to share grammatical errors that English speakers make daily without realizing it.
Note: Some quotes in this piece have been lightly edited for grammar.
1: All About Me
One native English speaker says using “I” instead of “me” still screws them up. For example, “That was a satisfying experience for Shirley and I” is incorrect. Another agrees, “This one is so common that I even thought using ‘me’ was the incorrect one.”
2: Get Schooled
An English teacher says a common error their students make is not using the correct past participle with the present perfect. “For example, instead of saying, ‘I should have gone to the party last night,’ they say, ‘I should have went to the party last night.’Â
3: Nobody’s Perfect
While one person says it’s rare for native English speakers to make major mistakes, they would consider things like “mixing up ‘there/their/they’re and ‘its/it’s’ and writing ‘should of’ instead of ‘should have’ to be the closest things to mistakes.”
4: Everybody Makes Mistakes
One language expert says depending on how much your native dialect diverges from the “standard” dialect, there might be hundreds of grammatical differences. “Even leaving this aside, people make mistakes in conversation even in their native dialect because the part of their brain thinking works faster than the part of their brain doing the talking,” they said.
5: Common Occurrence
An observant English speaker says they’ve encountered others applying the word “your” incorrectly many, many times. Case in point? “Mistake: ‘your tall.'”
6: Ease Up
A few commenters took issue with the original poster’s idea that native speakers can make mistakes. “A mistake implies the person was trying to mean something else but messed up. Dialects aren’t trying to say anything different than what was said, and nobody is messing up.”
7: Get It Right
It bothers one English speaker to their core when people say things like “‘a apple’ and such instead of ‘an.'”
8: Not Quite Right
One native English speaker says they hear people say phrases like ‘Where are you at?’ and “I could of done that,” and it grinds their gears.
9: Southern Charm
An American who lives in the South hears people say, “Where do you stay at?” and “Put that up” very often. “I also hear ‘acrosst’ (across) far more than I’d like to admit.”
10: In the Dictionary
Real grammar sticklers call people out on incorrect usage of “less” instead of “fewer.” One person said even Merriam-Webster states that virtually nobody naturally does this, and using “fewer” instead of “less” after plural numbers is “straight up incorrect.”
11: Plural Rules
“I read somewhere online that for a native English speaker, ‘there’s + plural noun’ sounds more ‘acceptable’ than ‘there is + plural noun.’ A few commenters backed this up and said, for example, “There are two cars parked outside” is grammatically correct.
12: Facing Reality
One person’s grammatical pet peeve came from watching The Bachelor on TV. “I know it isn’t exactly a hub for geniuses in the first place,” but they say it drives them up the wall when people say “(Name) and I” instead of “(Name) and my.”
13: Far Out
Another grammar error that bothers The Bachelor fan is not necessarily common on reality TV but in everyday life. “When people use ‘further’ vs. ‘farther,'” they said.
14: All Mixed Up
One reader was still confused, “‘Me neither’ is a grammar error?!” they said. “What have I done?” An English speaker reassured them, “No, quite the opposite.”
15: Learning Something New
One English speaker liked to think they knew all the “prescriptivist English grammar,” but they’d never heard of “do you ever” + present tense verb” being wrong until reading through the grammar forum. The original poster replied, “In cases like ‘do you ever use this?’ It’s correct because ‘ever’ is used for emphasis here.”
Source: Reddit.
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