Re: Advanced English to become official!

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