Speakers of non-English languages, what common mistakes do native speakers make that drive you crazy?

Tangled Slinky@infosec.pub to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 135 points –

For example, English speakers commonly mix up your/you're or there/their/they're. I'm curious about similar mistakes in other languages.

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Good points overall! I'd add that in my opinion "estaremos enviando" is closer to "we will be sending", which also better conveys the odd, misplaced telemarketer politeness vibes it carries.

we will be sending

This. I was struggling to convey the aspect, but you got it right IMO. And, pragmatically, it's more like "we might be sending", with that might highlighting that it probably won't.

Is 'estaremos enviando' not just Brazilian Portuguese?

I believe that it's more used in dialects spoken in Brazil than elsewhere, but even in Brazil it's considered poor grammar. Specially given that both nós conjugations¹ and the synthetic future² are falling into disuse, so it sounds like trying to speak fancy and failing hard at it.

EDIT: now it clicked me why you likely said so; it's common in European dialects to use "a enviar" (gerundive infinitive) instead of "enviando" (traditional gerund)³. The phenomenon that I'm talking about can be used with either, e.g. "estaremos a enviar"; for me it's the same issue, people would say "estaremos a enviar" instead of "enviaremos" to throw the event into a distant future that might never happen.

  1. They're still fairly used by older people in speech, but there's a clear gen gap with younger folks using "a gente" almost exclusively.
  2. almost completely replaced by conjugated ir + infinitive.
  3. Note that "enviando" is still fairly used in Alentejo and the Algarve.