After watching some political posts on Slovak Facebook I have noticed that many people commenting struggle with basic grammar concepts which are learned during the first 5 years of the basic school.
Is it also common in your country that people have problems with the grammar of their own language?
40 comments
Yes, and they cant spell either
Yes, very much. I think a contributing factor is that no one speaks literal Slovenian so when they write, it just comes out aweful. A lot of people seem to have trouble grasping very basic things like s/z (with) or k/h (to).
Not struggle per se, but many write in dialect
Yes. Italian has a fuckload of homophones that are also among the most common words.
o/ho, a/ha, ce/c’è, anno/hanno, ne/né/n’è, etc.
Now picture an uneducated person get “ce n’è” right – they have like 1/6 chance.
I think most languages have some aspect that native speakers mess up.
For Danish, a prominent one is hans/sin, which is hard to explain in English (which is probably why people mess it up these days), but basically is a way to distinguish between “he took his (own) hat” and “he took his (some other guy’s) hat.” Loads of people use the second one when they mean the first one.
A lot of these mistakes are things that only show up in writing, like using capitals and possessive apostrophes the way they are used in English (in Danish, “Father’s Bench” should be “Fars bænk” but is often written “Far’s Bænk”) or breaking up what should be compound words in ways that change the meaning of the sentence. All of these are mistakes people make because they apply English rules to Danish, but we’ve got a few home-grown mistakes as well. The most infamous is the dreaded af/ad distinction, two words that are pronounced the exact same in the spoken language but convey motion in different directions when written (throwing something out of the window is “ud *af* vinduet” but driving along the road is “hen *ad* vejen.)
I’m actually not completely sure I got the last one correct, that’s how common it is to mess it up…
Depends on what you mean with “grammar”. That’s a loose term.
If you mean standard spelling, that’s pretty common in languages where there’s multiple ways to spell the same sounds. Definitely a big issue for Greek, with it’s half a dozen ways to spell the sound /i/, for example.
If you mean inflection and conjugation and sentence structures, that’s pretty common when the standard register of the language is significantly removed from the natively acquired rules of the language. This is not such a big issue for Greek speakers who learn Standard Greek natively in most of Greece, but Cypriot Greek speakers who only learn Standard Greek in school can struggle.
If you mean punctuation rules, I think this is a universal struggle. In most languages punctuation rules are not top of mind for anyone who isn’t a professional writer or an obsessive nerd.
If you mean coherence and writing style, I think this is also a universal struggle for everyone for whom writing is not a core professional skill. Ever since my career change, I also feel that my writing style became more oral and therefore unclear.
Oh yes, so much
Only 70k daily users of Irish so yes.
You’ll hear people say ‘you/they was’, ‘if I was’, you’ll see people get there/their/they’re mixed up as well as a number of spellings (because English is a mess of a language lol), nothing that impedes communication though
Edit: ‘could/should of’ instead of ‘could/should have’ or ‘could/should’ve’ (the latter of which is almost homophonic with ‘could/should of’)
Grammar, spelling, punctuation – people have problems with all of it. Very noticeable in any comment section, e.g. Facebook, Reddit. We love to complain about it too – it’s like a national sport, generally with prescriptivists on one side and descriptivists on the other.
no. people use their own language. accidentally they make mistakes (you will recognize mistakes as those are not repeated) or they have their own dialect or a regional dialect. as for spelling sure, some people are not aware of the standardized guidelines that other people have created. bummer, good thing it is just a guideline, most “rules” originating in a historical phase of the language development.
Happens in every language I think. In Spanish is a common joke to say “if they distinguish between there is (hay), there ( ahí) and ouch (ay) keep them forever”.
Yes, very much so in Greece. Many Greeks struggle with orthography in particular, because Greek spelling is notoriously complex and irregular, since the language preserves a highly conservative, ancient writing system that doesn’t correspond neatly to modern pronunciation. We essentially still write in a historical spelling that reflects several layers of linguistic development.
The education system has also been deteriorating for decades now and it’s honestly just a joke nowadays. The combination of underfunding, outdated teaching methods and a general linguistic lethargy and extreme reduction of vocabulary (thanks social media and anglicisms!) is a death sentence for the Greek language.
It’s not really that people don’t know their own language (even though the grammar can be so complex that I often hear mistakes in spoken language as well…), but the orthography is unforgiving and the system hasn’t given them the tools to learn it properly.
Many Croats do not know how to differentiate č and ć in all of the words, as well as ije/je.
Myself included, I will never learn it for every word.
Also, word stress rules. My God, I do not stand a chance there.
Croatian grammar is obnoxious, what can I say.
Absolutely. It’s made worse now by people consuming so much media in english so it’s very common these days for people to only know some words in english.
Most European nations have literacy rates above 99%, but what literacy means in this case is simply being able to write something like “My name is Bob. I work on a building site.” (spelling optional). *Functional* literacy is quite a bit lower; normally somewhere between 70% and 80%.
Oh yes. Someone else mentioned political posts and I can confirm that it’s become a running joke in Germany that far right social media commenters can’t speak our own language.
(Russian fake accounts usually use better German, but it tends to sound stilted.)
In Germany, one might think the media have agreed to reject the genitive case. Furthermore, more and more prepositions and idioms are being misused. This is particularly shocking because there are repeated discussions about immigrants, refugees, etc., finally learning proper German. But what’s the point if not even the official media speaks good German? And what’s the excuse? Language changes, that’s all the people in question can think of. Speaking bad German because language is alive and changing. Logic in 2025.
Yep. Proper punctuation, capitalisation, and knowing how to properly join and not join prefixes and suffixes are a huge boondoggle for opinionated but ignorant facebook nationalists. These issues seem to be typical of right wingers, although many seem to struggle with some finer points of grammar, which when pointed out they go on to blame on autocorrect, which doesn’t really make things better.
Yes
Many people, especially younger, replace henne (her) with hun (she), and ham (him) with han (he). Han has become acceptable in both situations, but I still think it sounds wrong.
Ex. Jeg besøkte **henne**, men **hun** var opptatt (I visited **her**, but **she** was busy) turns into Jeg besøkte **hun**, men **hun** var opptatt (I visited she, but she was busy.
Many people also struggle with å and og because they sound practically the same. They usually replace og with å.
Å- before verbs in the infinitive, og – and
Ex. Buss og tog –> buss å tog, Ola og Kari –> Ola å Kari
A lot of Swedish people have no idea how to use the Swedish equivalent of “they/them” (de/dem) because many dialects pronounce them the same way. It’s also incredibly common for people to erroneously write compound words as two separate words (särskrivning), like writing “foot ball” instead of “football”.
I’d say in my country people struggle mostly with spelling and punctuation. Sometimes to an amazing degree that makes me think that a lot of people just don’t care, not that they aren’t able to write properly. Others you can tell that they speak a dialect that makes them confuse the spelling because they use the same sound for different letters (mostly people with seseo).
There are also grammar mistakes, even some that are very prevalent because they are used wrong in oral speech and people just write what they say, like using the infinitive as imperative (“ir” instead of “id”), or laismo… But I’d say they are less common.
yes grammar and spelling
A lot of people conjugate verbs incorrectly and/or don’t use the proper tenses. The elderly have an excuse because people like my grandparents only had school up until the end of the fourth grade, those being the only compulsory years during the dictatorship period. But even those born after that period struggle with that.
If you mean the official literary grammar, of course many people struggle with it.
Yes, incredibly so. I can’t spell either, but have the excuse of never receiving any formal language training in Finnish having grown up only speaking it at home and with friends when visiting Finland (grew up abroad). Finnish is essentially two languages, written and spoken. A lot of people just write spoken Finnish which means that when they actually need to write real written Finnish, they mess up grammar.
In Swedish I believe the most common mistake is to mix up *de*, *dem* and *det* (they, them, , that/it). I do it all the time. *Dem* is also often written as it pronounced, *dom*, which is wrong. But they’re probably going to update the language in future so that *dom* becomes the correct spelling as *dom* doesn’t make any sense at all. But Swedish is difficult, there are so many exceptions to the grammar rules that sometimes even native speakers mess them up. Some words differ also between Swedish and Finland-Swedish which may also cause some confusion.
A common problem with Swedish is how to use de/dem (they/them) correctly, they are both pronounced as dom so most people (natives included) get confused and just write dom
Swiss German has no official written form. This means you can write however you like and never make spelling mistakes.
Some would write “gsung” (healthy) as “xung”; some would write “schwyz” (Switzerland) as “schwiiz” or “schwiz” and so on.
Definitely, one of the most annoying is relative pronouns. Finnish has two “joka” which refers to the last word whether it is a person or a thing and “mikä” which refers to the entire sentence. Many misuse them copying the English rules and use “mikä” to refer to things.
Yes – and this should surprise absolutely nobody. It’s a difficult language.
It is common to mock and make fun of less educated people’s social media posts that are full of grammar issues. The bottom 10% includes a lot of minorities and early school-leavers that struggle with grammar a lot.
So there’s kind of norm that you should get at least ~98% of your words right before people will think you just made a mistake rather than assuming you are illiterate to a certain degree.
Everyone has different writing styles and some words may be correct in multiple forms, however the core of the language is pretty much the same regardless of dialects.
Also – built-in spell checkers in browsers handle Hungarian language quite well. It was also one of the first languages to be included in Microsoft Office – as far as I can remember I already used it in 2000 and worked like a charm. So those of us working in a tech-intensive environment are much more likely to become Grammar Nazis and set a much higher standard than what was the average in the 20th century.
I dont have problems with the grammar of my own language, but there are certain things i simply choose to ignore, like using A instead of a after .
Or using å or og in certain contexts, i just ignore all that stuff when i type on my phone for bs online. And it infuriates some people to no end.
Autocorrect and dictionary on your phone and laptop is also contributing to this, as you don’t have to write the word properly or even the full word for a pop up to appear with it.
In linguistics this would be called deviating from the prestigious variety. Their grammar is correct, just not in line with the prescriptivist and prestigious norm. Especially in informal contacts, such as when chatting to someone or posting on Facebook, it’s common to deviate from that norm. They speak in a way that’s more natural to them and possibly that presents them in a certain way (like clothing)
Oh yes. And when it comes to gender and number agreement, even people thinking they don’t make mistakes actually do some mistakes.
Sure.
Too many politicians in the parliament too…
Some people, yes.
It’s not common though.
It *is* common to not use perfect literary grammar, but I expect the average person to know the difference between “è” and “e”.
Married to a Spaniard, and lived in spain for 6/7 years. The average Spaniard cannot spell. Zero Fs given and they always think they’re right. What can possibly go wrong
By definition, native speakers can’t “struggle” with the grammar of their own language. They may use forms which aren’t considered standard, but that doesn’t mean they’re incorrect.
Yes. Young people have been infected by English and sometimes use the wrong syntax which is annoying and they don’t understand what subject/object is and how the pronouns change accordingly. Even worse is the way that they’ll directly translate English words or expressions without realising that those words or expressions already mean something else in Swedish. For example, ask out = bjuda ut (invite out) in Swedish but you’ll see people translating directly into ”fråga ut” which means interrogate. You’ll see people making posts on Swedish Reddit like “How can I interrogate a girl I like?” and I’m so tempted to just write “please don’t, it’ll be weird”.
Yes, and it’s usually the ones who declared themselves patriots and complain that education is not what it used to be. Irony is lost on them.