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Re: Advanced English to become official!

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Tuesday, April 5, 2005, 12:14
Hi!

Sanghyeon Seo <sanxiyn@...> writes:
> On Apr 5, 2005 6:11 PM, J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_wust@...> wrote: > > > I'd even affirm that someone who's learned a language at school will > > probably make less orthography errors than an avarage native speaker not > > interested in language matters (though the native speaker will hardly ever > > make wording errors which are most abundant in foreigners' language). >... > As a result, although I can understand in my head that _it's_ and _its_, > _there_ and _their_ sound exactly the same, I cannot really confuse them -- > they are written differently, after all! I think I have never got them wrong > in my entire English usage. But I saw that even those native English speakers > who are very good at spelling use it the other way around, and it surprised > me to see that.
Hmm, I started to develop the ability to make any mistakes, it seems. :-) Earlier on, when I had just learned English, I would not mix up "it's" and "its", but now, I also do that. The less I have to think about the language when writing, the more the purely phonetic representation influences the orthography, it seems. I think German's orthography has a little less sources for mixing things up, but those it does have are evenly likely to come out wrong for me. :-) The thing I dislike my speech center (or whatever center generates written text) most for is picking up bad spellings from advertisements, newspapers and any other public language exposition *unconsciously*, poisoning the algorithms, and reproduce mistakes without informing my higher brain functions about it. I can get really angry at myself about this since I really dislike the stupidly wrong stuff I read everywhere. To prevent these mistakes, I need to consciously reread and correct those intrusive and viruslike mistakes 'manually'... **Henrik

Replies

Sanghyeon Seo <sanxiyn@...>
B. Garcia <madyaas@...>