Second language speaks mistakes

 

 

When you go on holiday to a well built up British place, you consistently bombarded with incorrectly spelt advertisements or even the use of the wrong word. What makes English spelling harder to grasp than any other? And what makes the English language the hardest to learn?

The most common mistakes than we hear from a second language speaker is the plural vs. singular. As first language speakers we tend to ignore this. For example 'catched' instead of 'caught' 'tooths' instead of 'teeth'. These plural words don't stand within the general tenses rule of adding 's' or 'es'. Even when I type this Microsoft word is correcting 'tooths' into 'tooth's'. Without a doubt while growing up and learning the language we made the same mistakes.

In the English language we have lots of words which mean completely different things but look similar concentrate vs. concentrated. Although one means to engage in something and another means to remove the liquid, concentrated looks the past tense on concentrate. Although second language speakers can understand the English language better than first language speakers due to understanding  the mistakes.

Not using articles is really common for example 'I use laptop'  as in some language there isn't a definite or indefinite distinction. Also there is the opposite of using the article where it isn't need e.g. 'I enjoy the watching animals' . without having a meaning for the word 'the' it's difficult for second language speaks to understand the idea and concept of when and where to use it.

Prepositions like 'to' is misused in English language by second language speakers 'give it me' these small  are ignored or forgotten about because we still understand what they are saying and the reason of speech only because of the simplification taken place.

The use of superlative and comparatives in second language. Understanding the difference between big, bigger, biggest. For example 'more big' 'less big'. This is because in some languages they just add prefixes 'more' 'less' instead of adding endings. This makes it difficult for learners are without a direct translation the words key elements aren't important as in their naïve language works without them.

'I go shopping before'. Tenses in the English language are complicated and contain no rules. For example past simple, past perfect, past progressive and past perfect continuous, as native speakers naturally we don't get this wrong and most English first language speakers don't even know these classes of tenses even exist. For a second language speaker the different between 'she took ages to meet me' and 'she take ages to met me' may not even be noticeable to non native speakers. Using a present verb and a past verb completely make this conversation hard of hearing even when first language speakers understand clearly.

With all these multiple meanings, small word and tons and tons of tense words makes learning the British language the hardest in the world. Without rules and the lexical changes of words we all learn new things of the language every day.

Heidi Jabbari