4 ms·

Man, it's no wonder that people like me two aren't speaking English natively get confused about that whole *'s thing.

by r3bl 11y ago

Someone1234 11y ago
As a natively speaker let me just confirm: English is a very inconsistent language, where rules just as often result in doing the wrong thing as they do the right. Many native speakers get the 's/'/s/ies thing wrong, as well as two/too/to, and so on. I feel bad for anyone learning this language.
- ethbro 11y ago
  Maybe it's the trauma from compiler design, but in times of multiple stylistic options in English I try to trend towards standardization / the more broadly applicable version. Drop in the bucket, but my small part towards decreasing the number of exceptions. Edit: and just personally, I try to mentally associate homophones (two/too/to) with another word that helps clarify them (e.g. too:also).
- pilif 11y ago
  > I feel bad for anyone learning this language. clearly you have never tried out German :-) As a German native speaker who generally has a lot of difficulty learning languages, I can assure you that English was a lot more feasible for me compared to anything else I tried. (Of course you'll find an error in this comment - that is bound to happen in any comment talking about language mistakes)
  - ethbro 11y ago
    The only quirk to me is using "much" to modify an adjective ("feasible"), which in my experience (admittedly southern American English) a native speaker would not choose to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner (If you want to hate English slightly more :-) )
  - pluma 11y ago
    I've heard a nice explanation of the difference between learning English and learning German: The rules of English are relatively simple but there are a ton of exceptions that take a long time to get right and will give it away you're not a native speaker. German doesn't have as many exceptions so you can easily reach near-native levels of fluency once you know all the rules, but there are far more rules you need to be aware of (and even then you'll need to keep track of grammatical gender). In other words, you can learn German by simply following all the rules and memorizing the vocabulary, but it's far easier to do for English (where you'll miss a ton of exceptions if you only do that). Let's just say I'm happy I'm a native German speaker already -- I probably couldn't be bothered to become as fluent in it as I'm in English as a second language.
  - r3bl 11y ago
    In my experience, German was a piece of cake. Sure, it's a bit difficult at first, but pronunciation is easy once you figure it out and the grammar is not that hard. Dutch, on the other hand... :) I've been trying for five or six months now to pronounce 'Groningen' right, but I never succeeded. If there's one 'g' in a word, I can pronounce it. If there are two letters 'g' in one word, it's practically impossible for me.
    - p_eter_p 11y ago
      "Scheveningen" is the one that stopped me in my tracks.
- coldpie 11y ago
  Hey, at least we don't have goddamn gendered nouns. What an awful, awful idea that is.
  - NoGravitas 11y ago
    Or [noun classes][0] generally. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class
- laumars 11y ago
  The I Before E Except After C "rule" is another great example. Obligatory QI citation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duqlZXiIZqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duqlZXiIZqA
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pluma 11y ago
As a rule of thumb, if you attach "'s" to something ending with an "s", only attach the apostrophe. But there's no problem if you do it wrong, it's just a stylistic convention to reflect the phonetics. And for plural "s": if the word normally ends in a "s" or "sh" or "z" sound (or possibly even "zh", i.e. the "j" in French "je") add an "es" instead of "s". Some words are irregular but irregular words by definition don't follow the rules. The real confusion comes with possessive pronouns. It is "the boy's pet" but it is "his pet" (not #"he's pet"). They're not nouns (they're pro-nouns, i.e. something that is used instead of a noun) so the apostrophe-s rule doesn't apply to them, they just take on special forms. The confusion really just stems from English regularly allowing contractions like "-'s"/"-'" for "is" and "-n't"/"-'t" for "not" or "-'d" for "would". Pronouns can have contractions as suffixes (e.g. "he's" for "he is" or "he'd" for "he would") but nouns normally can't (#"the boy'd" isn't normally permissible, at least not in writing). It gets even worse if you consider that whether words can only be contracted additionally depends on their pronunciation (and role) within the sentence. You can't answer the question "Is he dead?" with #"He's.", for example. Oh, and I haven't even touched upon similar-sounding but entirely different things like "their" vs "they're" -- and I even caught myself accidentally mixing them up while writing this comment.
- nilkn 11y ago
  As coldpie mentioned above, your rule of thumb is definitely up for debate. I understand that one can't be overly prescriptive in grammar, but it's still very common to append "'s" to a word ending in "s" already to make it possessive, depending on context, and this is recommended in many modern style manuals.
madeofpalk 11y ago
It is funny when we can't figure out how to spell using our own language :)
brlewis 11y ago
English is ridiculously hard to get right. Witness the gp comment where someone who clearly thinks a lot about correctness has misspelled "lesson".

Man, it's no wonder that people like me two aren't speaking English natively get confused about that whole *'s thing.

by r3bl 11y ago

Man, it's no wonder that people like me two aren't speaking English natively get confused about that whole *'s thing.

As a natively speaker let me just confirm: English is a very inconsistent language, where rules just as often result in doing the wrong thing as they do the right. Many native speakers get the 's/'/s/ies thing wrong, as well as two/too/to, and so on. I feel bad for anyone learning this language.

ethbro 11y ago
Maybe it's the trauma from compiler design, but in times of multiple stylistic options in English I try to trend towards standardization / the more broadly applicable version. Drop in the bucket, but my small part towards decreasing the number of exceptions. Edit: and just personally, I try to mentally associate homophones (two/too/to) with another word that helps clarify them (e.g. too:also).
pilif 11y ago
> I feel bad for anyone learning this language. clearly you have never tried out German :-) As a German native speaker who generally has a lot of difficulty learning languages, I can assure you that English was a lot more feasible for me compared to anything else I tried. (Of course you'll find an error in this comment - that is bound to happen in any comment talking about language mistakes)
- ethbro 11y ago
  The only quirk to me is using "much" to modify an adjective ("feasible"), which in my experience (admittedly southern American English) a native speaker would not choose to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner (If you want to hate English slightly more :-) )
- pluma 11y ago
  I've heard a nice explanation of the difference between learning English and learning German: The rules of English are relatively simple but there are a ton of exceptions that take a long time to get right and will give it away you're not a native speaker. German doesn't have as many exceptions so you can easily reach near-native levels of fluency once you know all the rules, but there are far more rules you need to be aware of (and even then you'll need to keep track of grammatical gender). In other words, you can learn German by simply following all the rules and memorizing the vocabulary, but it's far easier to do for English (where you'll miss a ton of exceptions if you only do that). Let's just say I'm happy I'm a native German speaker already -- I probably couldn't be bothered to become as fluent in it as I'm in English as a second language.
- r3bl 11y ago
  In my experience, German was a piece of cake. Sure, it's a bit difficult at first, but pronunciation is easy once you figure it out and the grammar is not that hard. Dutch, on the other hand... :) I've been trying for five or six months now to pronounce 'Groningen' right, but I never succeeded. If there's one 'g' in a word, I can pronounce it. If there are two letters 'g' in one word, it's practically impossible for me.
  - p_eter_p 11y ago
    "Scheveningen" is the one that stopped me in my tracks.
coldpie 11y ago
Hey, at least we don't have goddamn gendered nouns. What an awful, awful idea that is.
- NoGravitas 11y ago
  Or [noun classes][0] generally. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class
laumars 11y ago
The I Before E Except After C "rule" is another great example. Obligatory QI citation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duqlZXiIZqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duqlZXiIZqA

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

pluma 11y ago

As a rule of thumb, if you attach "'s" to something ending with an "s", only attach the apostrophe. But there's no problem if you do it wrong, it's just a stylistic convention to reflect the phonetics. And for plural "s": if the word normally ends in a "s" or "sh" or "z" sound (or possibly even "zh", i.e. the "j" in French "je") add an "es" instead of "s". Some words are irregular but irregular words by definition don't follow the rules. The real confusion comes with possessive pronouns. It is "the boy's pet" but it is "his pet" (not #"he's pet"). They're not nouns (they're pro-nouns, i.e. something that is used instead of a noun) so the apostrophe-s rule doesn't apply to them, they just take on special forms. The confusion really just stems from English regularly allowing contractions like "-'s"/"-'" for "is" and "-n't"/"-'t" for "not" or "-'d" for "would". Pronouns can have contractions as suffixes (e.g. "he's" for "he is" or "he'd" for "he would") but nouns normally can't (#"the boy'd" isn't normally permissible, at least not in writing). It gets even worse if you consider that whether words can only be contracted additionally depends on their pronunciation (and role) within the sentence. You can't answer the question "Is he dead?" with #"He's.", for example. Oh, and I haven't even touched upon similar-sounding but entirely different things like "their" vs "they're" -- and I even caught myself accidentally mixing them up while writing this comment.

nilkn 11y ago
As coldpie mentioned above, your rule of thumb is definitely up for debate. I understand that one can't be overly prescriptive in grammar, but it's still very common to append "'s" to a word ending in "s" already to make it possessive, depending on context, and this is recommended in many modern style manuals.

madeofpalk 11y ago

It is funny when we can't figure out how to spell using our own language :)

brlewis 11y ago

English is ridiculously hard to get right. Witness the gp comment where someone who clearly thinks a lot about correctness has misspelled "lesson".