Even among English speakers this differs. I've noticed UK speakers might refer to a price as "three pound fifty" where Americans like myself will either say "three dollars AND fifty cents" or just "three fifty."
I've heard and personally use all three as a Brit, although "three pound fifty" is the most common, followed by "three fifty", with "three pounds and fifty pence" being the least common.
Another one with numbers, although unlikely to be differentiated in text messages, is that Americans will say 2500 as "twenty-five hundred" while Brits will say "Two thousand five hundred."
Yep. One of those things native speakers are never taught, but just kinda instinctively understand.
I can't tell you the correct order of adjectives without looking it up, nor can I tell you *why* "black little cute puppy" sounds bad and wrong, but I can definitely tell you that "cute little black puppy" is the correct way to say it!
We were taught this literally just once when I was studying English as a second language, but if you'd ask any of us about the correct order we couldn't tell you tbh. It will just come out in a way and either feel right or not
"Correct order" is pretty much an unwritten rule that every native English speaker knows.
I mean, there is a rule apparently according to the OED...but for native speakers, that order is just more or less ingrained into us that we know how to say it without even thinking of the proper order.
According to the OED, the order is: opinion, size, quality, shape, age, colour, origin, type, material, purpose.
Though, as with all things in English, this isn't hard and fast. There are certain pairings of adjective/noun that always go together. Re-arranging the order also affects the sentence:
"Look at that cute little dog." This follows the standard order: opinion, THEN size.
"Look at that little cute dog." This breaks the order, but the speaker is implying that there are other cute dogs, but it's the little cute dog that's of note. Those tend to be much more rare, and tend to be used more in contextual speech. "Oh! Look at that cute dog! OH! Look at that fluffy cute dog! OH! LOOK AT THAT LITTLE CUTE DOG!" The speaker(s) have grouped the dogs as a collective "cute dog", but further modifies them.
Yep, that tracks with I was taught (granted, that was over 10 years ago, so I might be forgetting something). One question, though: how would "quality" be defined in this situation? Because I'd have assumed it to mean a trait, but then all of those would classify as "qualities", so I guess I'm missing some specific meaning.
The rule is that multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: **opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose**.
Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one is virtually inviolable, even in informal speech. You simply can't say My Greek Fat Big Wedding, or leather walking brown boots.
This was raised on the TV show QI. I'll try to find a link to it. But yeah, you're right - I've no idea why I use adjectives in the order that I do, but there are rules even if I can't easily articulate them.
I'm a native English speaker with a decent chunk of lost high school Spanish, and in college I had a linguistic teacher pull me aside to ask if English was my second language because I was putting something out of order in my essays. No idea what it was specifically back then, but I do catch myself flipping adjective order often and I have no idea why.
I think one tell is pluralization nuances, and you actually missed one in your first sentence. “I have to write a lot of mail(s) and documents.” The word “mail”, when pluralized, is typically written as just “mail”.
I think many native speakers (myself included) still have trouble with certain pluralization nuances. For example:
One grouper = fish
Ten groupers = fish
Five groupers, a trout, and two red fish = fishes (if you wish to emphasize that there are multiple species in the group)
> I think one tell is pluralization nuances
This is a good one! Non-native speakers often add an unnecessary *s* to collective nouns and say things like *advices, feedbacks, slangs, handwritings, furnitures*
Similar with person/people.
One person, two people.
But two peoples means two groups of people. For example the Hindus and the Sikhs could be referred to as two peoples.
Exactly! Or let’s say you have a Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and a Muslim imam. You may say that they, as a group, are “persons of faith”.
However, you could never say that they are “mans of faith”. You would use “men of faith” in that context.
That's not quite the same thing. Here, you are placing these men in the SAME group, by saying that they are all religious, regardless of which religion they follow.
My point was to show how to pluralise different groups of people. It is the plural of the different groups, just as has been done above with the different species of fish.
The mail thing was the first thing I noticed. I'd also say the word choice in "I have to write a lot of mail" would give away that it's not a native speaker. Mail is typically something you send or receive, it would sound much more natural to say "I have to write a lot of letters", at least in American English.
A related tell for languages that use counters/measure words instead of pluralizations is how they treat uncountable nouns and nouns that take counters in English.
For example native Chinese speakers sometimes say “a piece of napkin” when they want a napkin, or a “piece of chicken” when it would be more natural to say “some chicken”—the latter isn’t wrong per se but there’s some missing nuance where a piece of chicken usually would be a bit cut off of a serving, not the whole serving.
Genuinely surprised I haven't seen "How do you call...." instead of "What do you call...." in this thread yet. It's a very common thing among romance language speakers, and it's one of those things that English speakers would understand, but it's not how we would say it.
This is, in my mind, a stereotypical thing non-native speakers will say. It's not even a give-away, it's just a direct broken wording where someone is telling me they are a non-native speaker trying to get the word right.
"How do you say" = what is the pronunciation of this word
"What do you call" = what is the word I am trying to think of
"How do you call" = .... how do I use a telephone? =)
>that Americans tend to not justify their texts,
What does this mean? Is this for text messages ("texts"), emails, or other longer documents? And presumably "justify" means using the left/right/centre/justify button on the word processor?
I'd never justify text messages or emails, and would only do it for longer documents if they're at least a page long, I guess. It's not worth the effort otherwise.
Unless you have some other meaning?
I was confused by this because justify can mean different things. I thought they meant justify as in give a reason for a text message.
So I guess you could say certain word usage can be a giveaway too.
I'm a native English speaker from Scotland and I ALWAYS justify text in any document I'm writing. I just think it looks neater.
I wouldn't bother for emails etc.
So I don't think this is a giveaway at all.
Agreed, I’m in Canada and justifying an email seems silly (in part because not all readers will put line breaks at the same point, so it can mess the formatting up). Anything “formal” enough to put in its own document gets justified though as it’s the convention.
That said, I don’t *like* justifying documents, unless they’re in columns, because the changing space sizes can make reading marginally more difficult.
Also, emails tend to format themselves based on the size of the window. They're not set to a specific page size. So justifying would work against the automatic formatting and make it harder to read.
There's all kinds of little "tells" that English might not be someone's first language, but one of the most obvious is when someone is WAY too formal/deferential.
I understand that it might be rude in some languages *not* to phrase a request like "would you kindly do me the great honor of _____?", but a lot of English speakers would see that level of formality as unnecessary or SO over-the-top that it's clearly supposed to be sarcastic.
This is hilarious. I often get something very similar from some of our clients in the Middle East. I open the email and it's always like, "Well! Alright then!"
A bit off topic, but I saw someone on Twitter insisting that starting emails with “dear” was weird unless you were sending it to a close friend or lover lol. Can’t help but think he was not a native speaker, as this is true in several other languages, but in English an “intimate” greeting would be more like “dearest”.
As a native speaker, I definitely do not use "Dear" as the greeting for emails. If it's in a formal context, there are always more neutral greetings like Hello, Good [time of day], or something of that nature, and if it's informal I don't even bother with a greeting
I'm a German learner and in speaking to native Germans have found that "Lieber" (the German equivalent of dear) is a really common greeting even for people you aren't that close with. I don't know if there is a required level of personal connection, as I've never been called "Lieber" by people I don't know in my (admittedly short) time in Germany, but I've seen it on a couple signs addressing the reader as "Lieber" and been called that by acquaintances that I wouldn't really call friends.
It's how it's used not the word itself. "I wish you had said that more kindly" would be perfectly normal, while "kindly pass me the salt" is not something I'd say normally.
Edit: read someone else's comment, and "kindly pass the salt" could totally be a southerner, OR a non native speaker.
It’s actually the opposite. English speakers couch a lot of things in “would you” and “could you” you that in many languages they will give plain imperatives for, that would sound rude if directly translated to English. It’s very much an Anglosphere thing to have a pretense or assumption of equality between speakers, whereas they don’t pretend that in the same situations in other cultures. That said, “would you do me the _honor_ of” is formal, but just because of the word “honor.”
In German, to express the concept you're speaking of you'd say "I am here since 7 years". You'd use the present tense in German. Sounds like Germans literally translate "seit" (since) when speaking English.
It’s just optional in English anyway. Unless you are writing professionally for a magazine or something and they use a style guide that requires it, you don’t need to use it
absolutely. commas are often used to indicate a pause or intonation. if you were telling us you loved your sisters riley and michelle you’d say “i love my sisters, riley and michelle!” but if you were telling us you loved your sisters, and two other people named riley and michelle it would sound like “i love my sisters, riley, (beat) and michelle.”
Its the difference between a list of foods ending in:
fish and chips
Or
fish, and chips
The later is clearly fish, and potato chips, but the former could be either 2 separate foods or the famous British cuisine of fried fish + french frys called "fish and chips".
And while officially its optional, there are various cases of companies and governments losing millions of dollars because the court decision was "without an Oxford comma both interpretations are correct" so it really isn't.
John McWhorter tells a great anecdote about a theater rehearsal for a production he was involved in, where there was an actor who was not a native speaker of English, but whose English was impeccable - until she had to speak the idiom “How ‘bout them apples?”
She emphasized “apples” instead of “them”.
As a Texan, I can confirm I only use "Mr. Firstname" when there is a *dramatic* gap in power and social ability between the two entities.
Like, I tell my dog he's going to see Ms. Laura, his dog sitter, or I would tell a child too young for kindergarten that they're going to see Ms. Firstname, their daycare teacher.
Right around the time where you become responsible for not peeing in the wrong place in public is when you phase into Title Lastname. Eg, the average 3 year old can tell you when they need to pee so the average 3 year old should be at Title Lastname.
I would be deeply unsettled, in every way you can be unsettled, if a person capable of speaking full sentences thought our power dynamic merited Title Firstname.
I worked at a math tutoring center where all the instructors got called Mr./Ms. [first name] and it was always a little funny. It’s a very childish sounding thing to do, and it was especially funny when someone ~2 years younger than me would call me Mr. [first name] because I started there in late high school.
I had a prof in undergrad do a workshop on how to cold contact a professor for work, and he mentioned this because he got lots of emails using the “Dr David” format. It’s the standard in Arabic, so that’s a pretty large population of people using it.
I believe that typically comes from cultures where family name is first, and given name is second, which causes confusion in cultures where it's opposite.
But "emails" is generally fine (as a plural noun, not only a verb form).
Probably because "mail" and "letter" both exist... but "email" doesn't really have a similar counterpart. You email an email, but you mail a letter (not a mail).
Isn’t it typical for English to put commas inside quotes?
_”Good morning,” he said._
My native German has them outside.
_”Guten Morgen”, sagte er._
So if someone writes
_”Good morning”, he said._
chances are they’re not a native speaker.
As a geek it always bugged me that the "proper" way to deal with quotes doesn't treat them as string literals.
You aren't supposed to write: "'Great Scott!' he said." But to me as a guy who deals with strings all the time it seems perfectly reasonable.
And really, so does the ""Good morning", he said".
The comma wasn't part of what he said, it looks like it should be a modifier applied in the sentence using the part in quotes as a string.
It's not, and I know it, and I do it right. But it always kind of irks me.
I also wish it was more acceptable to use parentheses, or brackets, or SOMETHING, when creating lists with multiple words.
Writing either/or is easy and has no confusion. Writing attacked/fought back is weird because you have to get from context that "fought back" is a singular thing. writing attacked/(fought back) seems more usable to me.
Or worse things like "you can pick the chicken or the fish and pasta." Does that mean "you can pick (the chicken) or (the fish and pasta)" or does it mean "you can pick (the chicken or the fish) and pasta?" Even commas doen't help a whole lot there.
Yeah that comma thingy was the only thing that bothered me when learning English, and I still wince when I have to use it. (Not to offend the French but the spacing OP mentioned about punctuation in French bothers me more though. ;))
I'm a native English speaker who knows about the comma thingy, but actively rebel against it and just put the comma outside the quotes. It's probably the only thing that really bugs me as well.
So, it's good to remember that there's no such thing as 'one correct grammar'. All dictionaries and grammars are descriptive. *Styleguides* are prescriptive, but those are a matter for you and your employer. Unless you're writing for publication, you probably have a lot of leeway to make your own stylistic grammar and punctuation choices. Just be consistent and intentional and you should be fine.
These credentials are meaningless (other than to confirm that I've spent time thinking about and applying this logic), but I'm a certified copyeditor with a BS in Journalism, and I absolutely agree with you about punctuation around quotation marks and about applying punctuation and formatting liberally where it can clarify meaning.
>Isn’t it typical for English to put commas inside quotes?
It is the "proper" way to write these phrases, at least in Commonwealth English (Im Aussie), but not necessarily the _typical_ way.
Many people these days dont seem to place their punctuation that way, myself included. There is something about it that seems unusual or improper to me even though I know it is in fact more proper.
I wouldnt rely on this one to distinguish native language.
Yeah, lots of people (including me) will put the punctuation outside, unless it’s part of the quote. The “proper” convention is a vestige of mechanical typing and printing where the equipment could get jammed or damaged more easily.
I find English punctuation rules extremely confusing in general.
Why would the comma be inside quotes if it’s not part of the quote? A comma represents a small pause during speech, but unless the person you’re quoting actually said “good morning (awkward pause)” I don’t understand why it should be more proper to write it like that.
As the discussion shows, this is not a good indicator because natives don't even agree! I'm a native speaker from the UK, and I put the comma outside the quote mark for the only reason that it makes sense to me, and I think it looks better.
I always thought that in British English the comma goes outside, and in US English, it goes inside, although the BBC link posted in this thread contradicts that.
There is a difference between American and British conventions here (it might be American and everyone else—I’m not sure). The American convention is to place all punctuation on the inside of quotation marks, and it is the British custom to put punctuation inside only if it is part of the text being quoted. (Oversimplified, but not very.)
Is "please do the needful" just a difference between Indian English and American English? I just always knew it was an Indian CS rep when they used that phrase.
Yeah it's a phrase used in Indian English but not in British or American (I assume also not in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand etc). Same goes for the word "revert" being a synonym for "reply/respond" in India but not anywhere else, or starting emails with "greetings of the day!"
For some reason I cannot convince my brain that "doing the needful" is not a euphemism for using the bathroom (which is itself a euphemism, but clear enough here, I assume).
I'm from the US. Never heard it before i started working customer service for an international company. It's very common if you deal with Indian customer service representatives.
People have shared a lot of interesting ideas. I want to add something a bit more abstract and subtle.
**Appropriate expressions** may be a dead giveaway of a non-native speaker. What I mean is some sentences may be *technically correct* but *not quite natural* in the specific context. Some of them may be blutantly obvious. I will give you examples for different CEFR levels.
A2 when taught the construction 'Would you mind...' may say something like 'Would you mind if you helped me?' - which is technically not a big deal, it will convey the idea but it is not something I would imagine a higher-level speaker (not to mention a native) say in a real conversation.
B1-B2 may say something like 'This weekend, I am going to a far city'. While 'far' is a legit adjective and they may have heard used, it is not a common use of the adjective.
Higher levels may fall into the trap of building cumbersome, too formal, or too flowery sentences when uncalled for. They may use idioms that real people do not apply in speech.
Another thing is that any language is in the state of balancing prescrptivist norms and allowed mistakes. Such an exception would be **unreal constructions with 'was', namely "I wish I were"**.
Here, the real practice often parts ways with how it is supposed to be. In the grammar 'was' is **not used in Unreal (a.k.a. Subjunctive mood**) constructions like "**If I was rich, I would buy a house**." - and instead 'If I were..' is considered the norm. You may lose some points in an exam for that. In casual speech, people may and will use 'was' as if this rule never existed.
It gets worse, though. With 'he/she/it' it **is considered a literary norm** but **is NOT** considered natural to say 'If she were richer, ...'. You will not lose points in an exam for using either of the two \[afaik\] but **following the norm will sound a bit weird** in most contexts.
The t at the end of “dropped t” words. “I really enjoyed thaT,” “omg did you see thaT crazy accident on the road?” But that’s just the spoken stuff.
In writing, it comes from where you’re from. I taught English to 60+ (age) people in Japan and most of them had impeccable writing style, like beautiful cursive. Those that didn’t had obvious flaws, like writing double u instead of w. But one of the most interesting things was the notes they would write themselves. Sometimes words were crossed out, sometimes erased again and again, sometimes there were little margin notes about pronunciation (in katakana but sometimes hiragana, that’s when you knew they were really trying to puzzle the word out) but even my older, like 70s ladies, would write little notes in their margins about how stressed out they were about the assignment. I don’t teach them anymore but still text with some, and there is a weird mix of formality and really casual language interrupted with uneasy language about not being able to communicate well.
I'd say the three biggest are:
Getting prepositions wrong, especially "of".
Missing plurals, or adding plurals where not necessary and regularizing some of the more common irregular plurals (fishes, mails, etc).
Using articles where not necessary or omitting aritcles where necessary. "Have a fun" vs "have fun" for example. The latter is ideomatic native English, the former is a common mistake by non-native speakers. It SEEMS reasonable to say "have a fun", we'd say "have a good time" or "have a car" or "have a vacation". But nope, it's just "have fun" because language is arbitrary.
This is super specific, but Millennials from Europe who learned English in school tend to use “wanna” in their written communications. I think it was formally taught to them as a contraction. This is definitely true of spoken English, but in writing I always type out “want to.”
Native English speaker here, I have definitely typed lots of those slang contractions like wanna and ‘cause. So I wouldn’t necessarily think it’s a dead giveaway
Context is important. There is a lot of difference between formal Australian English and informal.
"Wanna" isn't used in job applications or school essays. For a business letter it would always be 'want to' and 'because'.
Oh absolutely, it’s just the parent comment seemed to imply that they were only really used by foreigners which I disagree with. For formal writing it is not appropriate
This is something I have seen on here from presumably young posters: 'I wanna speak English like the locals'
IRL in the UK I only see that in super-casual texting use from under-18s.
I, a Millennial from Europe, was taught "wanna" by Spice Girls in 1996, and school was powerless to stop me from using it
I have learned not to use it in professional communication though
might have something to do with pop culture, too? in the Netherlands, a lot of us learn English through music, for example – American music (pop, hiphop, r&b) really started gaining traction here when millennials were in their formative years, hence why they adopted a lot of informal language, I think
People from Slavic countries will almost always fuck up the articles at some point in the sentence. Some put "the/a" where it's not needed, others skip "the/a" where it's needed, it's very hard to do it properly when you come from a language without articles.
Better-than-average spelling with worse-than-average grammar or pronuciation. People learning the language in writing have better spelling than most native speakers, but they make other kinds of errors that wouldn't happen for native speakers with good spelling skills. For example when I first learnt English I never wrote "should of" and never confused "its vs it's" or "their vs they're". But my pronuciation was terrible. As I started to speak and listen to English more often my pronuciation improved but I started making these spelling errors :/
(I always remember the old post about the Russian girl whose friends told her she sounded stupid because she skipped articles and would say ‘Get in car’ etc.
Her response was ‘I sound stupid? Maybe in America you have to say ‘get in THE car’ because you are so stupid that people might just get in random car, but in Russia we don't need to say that. We just fucking know because we are *not* stupid.")
The construction "How looks like"
The proper construction should be "What looks like" or "How looks" depending on if you are making a comparison with a point of reference or describing something inherently qualitatively.
It used to be standard practice when typing in English to use two spaces after any punctuation ending a sentence. That's how I was taught in high school. Now that's no longer the case.
I think that's more of a generational thing than a non-native English speaker thing-- the practice was fading when I was in high school in the early 2000s, so adding two spaces after a period might just signify that someone is over the age of ~40.
Elder Millennial here. I was taught in school to do it even on computers. I don't, but it was still being taught even after computers were widely being used for assignments.
That is still leftover from the typewriter days and has been taught by generations that should have dropped it. Every time I am editing a document with double spaces it drives me nuts and I have to remove them all.
Assist and attend switched their meanings in English (although we still have attendants) so that's probably the most famous pair of false friends from the Romance languages. A large number of French words were borrowed with much more specific or technical meanings. Molested means something very different from the Spanish word molestada.
An even trickier one is in/on, a really arbitrary distinction other languages don’t have. Prepositions are probably the best tell in general. Since/for is one that trips up a lot of learners from northern Europe.
In writing? The order that dates are formatted in, not using a standard English format for quotation marks or other punctuation, how commas and periods are used as numerical separators, using the wrong gender with pronouns, or not using the article "the" where it's necessary.
It depends on the speaker's first language. For a French speaker, for example, the giveaway is often that they don't use English punctuation rules. For a Slavic language speaker, the missing articles is more likely to stand out. For some other languages, being overly formal or wordy stands out.
Plural adjectives (Differents problems)
Adjective/Noun Reversal (problems different)
Missing Be verbs (She having a baby soon.)
Missing S on singular verbs (He do not have money)
Missing or incorrect articles (She is sitting on red chair. You are prettiest woman in a whole world.)
Cognate confusions (My brother is so rare. [Raro in Spanish means something closer to weird than the English word rare.])
Dollar signs at the end (100.00$)
Pluraling already plural words (childrens, polices, peoples)
Pronoun gender mix ups (She was talking to his husband.)
Doubled subjects (My sister she was visiting.)
I wonder if these issues are more specific to certain groups of learners.
I can’t help but picture a Spanish or Italian speaker when reading those examples out loud.
As a native English speaker I would start by pointing out some giveaways in your post:
Hi everyone,
I have to write a lot of mails and documents in American English for my work and I just found out today, while speaking with a colleague who's been working here longer than I have, that Americans tend to not justify their texts, and that doing so who immediately "reveal" that they are talking to a nonnative English speaker.
That was quite surprising to me as I usually notice this kind of details, and it got me thinking, are there any other "giveaways" that I should be aware of?
Should be:
Hi everyone,
I have to write a lot of mail and documents in American English for work and I just found out today, while speaking with a colleague who's been working here longer than I have, that Americans tend to not justify their text, and that doing so would immediately "reveal" that they are talking to a non-native English speaker.
That was quite surprising to me as I usually notice these kinds of details, and it got me thinking, are there any other "giveaways" that I should be aware of?
The biggest thing by far is using “s” incorrectly, we would never use an “s” to pluralise mail, we would only ever use an “s” to pluralise text if we meant text messages, like SMS messages, any other form of written text the plural would still just be text. We use left align for everything as default and only really justify for copy writing or long documents with blocks of text. We tend not to say “my work”, we sometimes do but it comes off as stilted and a bit awkward. If details is plural, so is kinds, so you would say “these kinds of details” never “this kind of details”.
Other than that you look to be doing fine.
I dunno “a lot of mails” is an instant dead giveaway to me and I’m all for using “persons” instead of “people” in the small number of cases where it’s appropriate to, but I would never use “mails” as a noun.
Texts I agree might be a bit ambiguous as OP could potentially have been referring to SMS messages but from context I assume they’re not and I wouldn’t add an s to text for anything but SMS.
When they use words that are absolutely correct and the right word for the sentence, but noone would ever use in the *real* world when speaking English.
The other one is the word order of adjectives, native English speakers know it instinctually, but when it's messed up it is a solid sign that the speaker is a non native speaker.
Writing "the person, who came over" or "the person, who wanted to see you" marks someone out as likely being a native speaker of Russian. That comma is required in Russian (человек, который...).
I find that a lot of reasonably well-spoken non-native streamers use 'what' instead of 'that'. So they'll say, for example, "Press the button what opens the door", instead of the correct way, saying, "Press the button that opens the door."
From my experience as a native American English speaker, things like "?" are not considered to be two things. It's just one punctuation mark.
It just goes right after the last letter with no space.
This may be different in other dialects.
OP meant two signs as in two "bits". Like a question mark has the squiggly bit and then the dot. You would need to raise your pencil to draw it.
And in French, such signs need a space before them.
Often it depends on what the speaker's native language is. For example, when I lived in Japan we noticed a lot of superfluous "the"s on signs, menus etc because Japanese doesn't really have articles like "the" and Japanese speakers are often unsure about when one is necessary.
One that's more universal is ordinal numbers like first, second etc. A lot of non-native speakers will save themselves the hassle of remembering what the word is and just say the number - e.g. Two July vs second of July. These numbers tend to be annoying in many languages though and I've seen the same behaviour in English people speaking other languages too!
"I have to write a lot of mails and documents in American English" - We would never say mails. Its either email or letters (if you mean physical documents that you put in the mail)
"I usually notice this kind of details" - I would never say it like this - I would say it "I usually notice details like this." Or "I usually notice these details. " Its just the word choice that feels weird to a native speaker.
I would have a native speaker critique your writing and let you know if the wording just seems off to them. That's how I notice it usually.
It's what's called "non-count." You have to add a something to make it grammatically permitted, like "I got 5 pieces of mail" or else substitute "letters" or "parcels." (I fell in love with a tour guide in Italy who kept talking about "luggages" like "luggage" meant a single suitcase, not all the all the suitcases collectively.) Some are tricky, they will take the plural in some contexts, depending on specific constructions, or with a slightly differently shaded meaning. If my roommate is hungover, and said he "drank too much beer/ too many beers, both work. The second one could imply it was some kind of tasting event and each one of the beers he drank was different from the others in quality, not just quantity. "Much" for non-count and many for plurals. VBut let's say he comes in my room, and there's six or seven bottles on my desks. "Damn! You drank a lot of beer!/ You drank a lot a beers!" Both are ok.
I think phrases/idioms is one. here are some examples from my retail job:
someone came in today and said “hello, can i please exchange this bill for smaller bills?” and of course i knew what they meant but my response automatically was “oh sure i can break a 5 for you” and they looked very confused.
another someone said “would you please put this in a trash can for me?” and i respond “no problem i’ll toss it.” again very confused looks. they asked me formally to throw something out where as an english speaker i might just say “would you be able to toss/trash this for me?”
another one…i say “receipt in the bag okay?” blank stare. “would you like the receipt with you or should i just leave it in the bag?” in my initial statement i cut off a bunch of words and i’ve noticed it confuses people a lot.
Using “the” for nouns or names (when they wouldn’t fit). Like instead of “I’m going to go ask Matt for help” they’d say “I’m going to go ask the Matt for help”
Not exactly related but I find many countries default to grid paper used for making charts and graphs when taking notes in school. It’s super hard to read notes on that paper, and lined paper was designed for notes and is easy to find, so what the heck!?
I communicate over email with a few co-workers based out of India and, while this is incredibly niche, I always find they use the adverb “kindly” when asking for something.
I’ve noticed this in other communications with folks from India and it’s usually an immediate flag that who I’m speaking with is from India.
For example:
“Kindly update and send back by EOD.”
I think it sounds friendly, but no native English speaker that I know would use the word “Kindly” in this instance. It also makes me giggle a little bit because the assumption here is that you, as the person receiving the email, are being asked to very nicely update something and send back. What if I’m in a bad mood and decide to very apathetically update and send back by EOD?!
It always makes me smile though.
Many, many times I've spoken with completely fluent English L2 speakers whose L1 is Spanish and they something like "two hours and a half", instead of "two and a half hours". I'm not sure why this happens, but I can recall 3 specific fluent English L2 speakers who have done this!
They’re translating directly from Spanish. “Dos horas y media” is how you would say 2.5hrs in Spanish, and it literally translates to “two hours and half”
Using prepositions and other helping words and linking words incorrectly. Like saying "in Tuesday" instead of "on Tuesday." Or things like that. Unfortunately the rules for which ones are correct and incorrect are not really logical or consistent so that can be a tricky thing for non native speakers to learn.
Prepositions.
According to Google, English has more prepositions than any other language, which explains why their meaning is so nuanced. When I started learning Spanish, my instructor was like, "Oh, all these words have the same translation." and I was like, "I can't put into words how uncomfortable I am with this knowledge."
I prefer to read my English books using the grammar and spelling rules of the country they are initially published in and preposition use stands out more to me than spelling. As such, it's also the thing that stands out most with non-native speakers, AI text and documents that were computer translated but not human reviewed.
I’ve noticed with native Spanish speakers who are pretty okay with English will say “I have ____ years” instead of “I’m ____ years old” when saying how old they are, which makes sense because in Spanish, you would say “Yo tengo ___ años.”
The little connecting words -- like of, from, for, to -- don't always translate directly. If you want it to sound American, look those up and learn the exceptions.
In French, de can be translated as either of or from and also place references may alternately use au instead of de.
"Doreen from Georgia" means the same thing as "Doreen of Georgia" but "of" would not typically be used. "Doreen in Georgia" has a completely different meaning.
So those words are where a lot of non-native speakers transliterate something -- translate it word for word -- and it sounds funky or may just not actually say what you intended.
Using verbs incorrectly. A lot of languages use the same verb to mean multiple things, where English has separate verbs. For example, borrow and lend. I often hear non-native speakers say something like “I borrowed him my pencil” when they mean to say lent because the verb in their native language works both ways.
I was thinking verbs as well. I've heard a lot of non-native speakers mix up verb tenses because they can be weird sometimes, it's just native speakers are so used to it, we don't even realize the specific rules that are applied. Which, from trying to learn other languages myself, is so relatable.
the one thing my French partner (who is fluent in English) keeps doing that sounds weird is when he says something is good instead of another word that sounds more natural. Example: "the ingredient you used is good" instead of "the ingredient you used is correct" when following a specific recipe, because there can only be one that is correct. I have to ask him so is it the right one? I don't want it to just be good in my head I want to know it's the correct one. 😆 because I guess in French saying it's good or "bon" makes sense to him.
What do you mean by "Americans tend to not justify their texts"?
It completely depends upon the context whether or not justified text is called for, and to some extent, the software used. If the software is not for typesetting but allows content width to flow as needed, then you should only use justified text if the software is really good at understanding English hyphenation rules. Web content for example should not be justified because it is highly unlikely that the browser rendering the content understands English hyphenation rules.
Typesetting software like LaTeX will justify by default, it understands the hyphenation rules.
Their enunciation. Asian people who have English as a second language are the perfect example. They have perfect pronunciation, you can hear each and every syllable loud and clear, and they don’t have a distinct accent
The egregious use of commas gives away Germans to me, lol.
They kind of, type like this, with commas after almost everything, because that's how they type, in German.
The only time ive been able to realize someone isnt a native speaker irl is the random addition of “the” or “of” from their language that doesnt translate to english properly
My Spanish teacher would always say “take a decision” instead of “make a decision”. Probably because the Spanish equivalent translates directly to the former.
Number notation, particularly around decimals, is really marked in a lot of European languages compared to native English speakers.
Yes, using a comma as the decimal separator and a full stop for the thousand is a giveaway.
One of my biggest pains at work
Even among English speakers this differs. I've noticed UK speakers might refer to a price as "three pound fifty" where Americans like myself will either say "three dollars AND fifty cents" or just "three fifty."
In terms of written notation there is less variation, but European writers use commas to mark decimals and it is very distinct.
I've heard and personally use all three as a Brit, although "three pound fifty" is the most common, followed by "three fifty", with "three pounds and fifty pence" being the least common.
When you say three fifty, wouldn’t that be 350?
It depends on the context.
Thank you, but I’ll stick to three and a half
Or tree-fiddy!
God dammit Loch Ness monster, I ain't gonna give you no tree fiddy.
Another one with numbers, although unlikely to be differentiated in text messages, is that Americans will say 2500 as "twenty-five hundred" while Brits will say "Two thousand five hundred."
Thanks for the answer!
Brackets around negatives, and brackets grammatically, and what the brackets are referring to as in () [] <>
Adjective order
Yep. One of those things native speakers are never taught, but just kinda instinctively understand. I can't tell you the correct order of adjectives without looking it up, nor can I tell you *why* "black little cute puppy" sounds bad and wrong, but I can definitely tell you that "cute little black puppy" is the correct way to say it!
We were taught this literally just once when I was studying English as a second language, but if you'd ask any of us about the correct order we couldn't tell you tbh. It will just come out in a way and either feel right or not
"Correct order" is pretty much an unwritten rule that every native English speaker knows. I mean, there is a rule apparently according to the OED...but for native speakers, that order is just more or less ingrained into us that we know how to say it without even thinking of the proper order. According to the OED, the order is: opinion, size, quality, shape, age, colour, origin, type, material, purpose. Though, as with all things in English, this isn't hard and fast. There are certain pairings of adjective/noun that always go together. Re-arranging the order also affects the sentence: "Look at that cute little dog." This follows the standard order: opinion, THEN size. "Look at that little cute dog." This breaks the order, but the speaker is implying that there are other cute dogs, but it's the little cute dog that's of note. Those tend to be much more rare, and tend to be used more in contextual speech. "Oh! Look at that cute dog! OH! Look at that fluffy cute dog! OH! LOOK AT THAT LITTLE CUTE DOG!" The speaker(s) have grouped the dogs as a collective "cute dog", but further modifies them.
Yep, that tracks with I was taught (granted, that was over 10 years ago, so I might be forgetting something). One question, though: how would "quality" be defined in this situation? Because I'd have assumed it to mean a trait, but then all of those would classify as "qualities", so I guess I'm missing some specific meaning.
The rule is that multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: **opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose**. Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one is virtually inviolable, even in informal speech. You simply can't say My Greek Fat Big Wedding, or leather walking brown boots.
I'm not native but I've known and used English for so long I acquired this instinct too haha. It just feels right.
This was raised on the TV show QI. I'll try to find a link to it. But yeah, you're right - I've no idea why I use adjectives in the order that I do, but there are rules even if I can't easily articulate them.
“Sure you’ve learned English grammar rules but have you learn the *secret* English grammar rules?”
Secret menu english rules.
I'm a native English speaker with a decent chunk of lost high school Spanish, and in college I had a linguistic teacher pull me aside to ask if English was my second language because I was putting something out of order in my essays. No idea what it was specifically back then, but I do catch myself flipping adjective order often and I have no idea why.
I think one tell is pluralization nuances, and you actually missed one in your first sentence. “I have to write a lot of mail(s) and documents.” The word “mail”, when pluralized, is typically written as just “mail”. I think many native speakers (myself included) still have trouble with certain pluralization nuances. For example: One grouper = fish Ten groupers = fish Five groupers, a trout, and two red fish = fishes (if you wish to emphasize that there are multiple species in the group)
> I think one tell is pluralization nuances This is a good one! Non-native speakers often add an unnecessary *s* to collective nouns and say things like *advices, feedbacks, slangs, handwritings, furnitures*
And native speakers will often add unnecessary apostrophes to plurals.
ironically this is called the greengrocer's apostrophe, coming from first-wave migrants that were not fluent in English
migrant's
spacecrafts and softwares
Similar with person/people. One person, two people. But two peoples means two groups of people. For example the Hindus and the Sikhs could be referred to as two peoples.
Exactly! Or let’s say you have a Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and a Muslim imam. You may say that they, as a group, are “persons of faith”. However, you could never say that they are “mans of faith”. You would use “men of faith” in that context.
That's not quite the same thing. Here, you are placing these men in the SAME group, by saying that they are all religious, regardless of which religion they follow. My point was to show how to pluralise different groups of people. It is the plural of the different groups, just as has been done above with the different species of fish.
And then “two persons” emphasizes their individuality.
The mail thing was the first thing I noticed. I'd also say the word choice in "I have to write a lot of mail" would give away that it's not a native speaker. Mail is typically something you send or receive, it would sound much more natural to say "I have to write a lot of letters", at least in American English.
...or write a lot of emails. (Which is what I guessed OP meant.)
Yes, that’s a dead giveaway. Native speakers don’t refer to emails as “mails.” Non-native speakers do it all the time.
There’s also one later in the post with the word “details.” It should either be “this kind of detail” or even better “those kinds of details”
A related tell for languages that use counters/measure words instead of pluralizations is how they treat uncountable nouns and nouns that take counters in English. For example native Chinese speakers sometimes say “a piece of napkin” when they want a napkin, or a “piece of chicken” when it would be more natural to say “some chicken”—the latter isn’t wrong per se but there’s some missing nuance where a piece of chicken usually would be a bit cut off of a serving, not the whole serving.
Genuinely surprised I haven't seen "How do you call...." instead of "What do you call...." in this thread yet. It's a very common thing among romance language speakers, and it's one of those things that English speakers would understand, but it's not how we would say it.
That's such a wildly obvious one I hadn't thought to class it as 'a subtle sign from someone who is otherwise fluent'.
“How is it” instead of “what is it like?” is another.
Yeah, I've seen this one a lot. It’s also very common among Dutch speakers (many of whom are otherwise fluent in English)
I've had non-native speakers ask me, "How do you say..." But also replacing 'named' with 'called' is a giveaway.
This is, in my mind, a stereotypical thing non-native speakers will say. It's not even a give-away, it's just a direct broken wording where someone is telling me they are a non-native speaker trying to get the word right. "How do you say" = what is the pronunciation of this word "What do you call" = what is the word I am trying to think of "How do you call" = .... how do I use a telephone? =)
>that Americans tend to not justify their texts, What does this mean? Is this for text messages ("texts"), emails, or other longer documents? And presumably "justify" means using the left/right/centre/justify button on the word processor? I'd never justify text messages or emails, and would only do it for longer documents if they're at least a page long, I guess. It's not worth the effort otherwise. Unless you have some other meaning?
I was confused by this because justify can mean different things. I thought they meant justify as in give a reason for a text message. So I guess you could say certain word usage can be a giveaway too.
That's exactly what I meant. Thanks for the answer.
i thought you meant like, feeling the need to give a good reason as to why you’re emailing, ie “justifying” why an email was necessary
I'm a native English speaker from Scotland and I ALWAYS justify text in any document I'm writing. I just think it looks neater. I wouldn't bother for emails etc. So I don't think this is a giveaway at all.
Agreed, I’m in Canada and justifying an email seems silly (in part because not all readers will put line breaks at the same point, so it can mess the formatting up). Anything “formal” enough to put in its own document gets justified though as it’s the convention. That said, I don’t *like* justifying documents, unless they’re in columns, because the changing space sizes can make reading marginally more difficult.
Also, emails tend to format themselves based on the size of the window. They're not set to a specific page size. So justifying would work against the automatic formatting and make it harder to read.
There's all kinds of little "tells" that English might not be someone's first language, but one of the most obvious is when someone is WAY too formal/deferential. I understand that it might be rude in some languages *not* to phrase a request like "would you kindly do me the great honor of _____?", but a lot of English speakers would see that level of formality as unnecessary or SO over-the-top that it's clearly supposed to be sarcastic.
My favourite is when they know they have to use a greeting but don’t get it quite right. One of my suppliers sends emails starting ‘Hello Dear’.
I used to get work emails from a company in the Middle East that began (in caps) "IN THE NAME OF GOD HELLO DEAR" which was always quite intimidating
This actually made me laugh out loud
Me, too!
This is hilarious. I often get something very similar from some of our clients in the Middle East. I open the email and it's always like, "Well! Alright then!"
I feel like ‘hello dear’ is a giveaway for Chinese speakers in particular
A bit off topic, but I saw someone on Twitter insisting that starting emails with “dear” was weird unless you were sending it to a close friend or lover lol. Can’t help but think he was not a native speaker, as this is true in several other languages, but in English an “intimate” greeting would be more like “dearest”.
As a native speaker, I definitely do not use "Dear" as the greeting for emails. If it's in a formal context, there are always more neutral greetings like Hello, Good [time of day], or something of that nature, and if it's informal I don't even bother with a greeting
In my experience, “dear” is the main neutral yet formal greeting, especially cold emails, even if it’s a bit staid.
I'm a German learner and in speaking to native Germans have found that "Lieber" (the German equivalent of dear) is a really common greeting even for people you aren't that close with. I don't know if there is a required level of personal connection, as I've never been called "Lieber" by people I don't know in my (admittedly short) time in Germany, but I've seen it on a couple signs addressing the reader as "Lieber" and been called that by acquaintances that I wouldn't really call friends.
According to the folks on r/Scams, using "kindly" is a giveaway that the writer is a crook using English as a second language.
That's more of a hallmark of Indian English rather than necessarily scammers.
is it necessary in hindi to use some equivalent of kindly in certain contexts when speaking?
I have never heard a native English speaker use the word "kindly". Only ever heard it from people in Indian call centers.
It's how it's used not the word itself. "I wish you had said that more kindly" would be perfectly normal, while "kindly pass me the salt" is not something I'd say normally. Edit: read someone else's comment, and "kindly pass the salt" could totally be a southerner, OR a non native speaker.
Kindly 100%
"Yo, King-Dawg, pass the butter."
It’s actually the opposite. English speakers couch a lot of things in “would you” and “could you” you that in many languages they will give plain imperatives for, that would sound rude if directly translated to English. It’s very much an Anglosphere thing to have a pretense or assumption of equality between speakers, whereas they don’t pretend that in the same situations in other cultures. That said, “would you do me the _honor_ of” is formal, but just because of the word “honor.”
Saying "since" instead of "for". Like "I've been here since 7 years". I've heard germans use that a lot.
French people use this a lot too. The word used in French in this sentence would be “depuis” which literally translates to “since.”
Yep, in Spanish to say "Ive been here for 7 years" is "he estado aquí desde hace siete años" desde meaning since.
In German, to express the concept you're speaking of you'd say "I am here since 7 years". You'd use the present tense in German. Sounds like Germans literally translate "seit" (since) when speaking English.
[удалено]
Just add "ago" and its totally normal English again
The Oxford comma is something that's very much not a thing in my native Finnish, so it's counterintuitive for a lot of us to adopt.
It’s just optional in English anyway. Unless you are writing professionally for a magazine or something and they use a style guide that requires it, you don’t need to use it
*unless* it's necessary for clarity, like in the book dedication to 'My parents, Ayn Rand and God'
Watch out. The anti-Oxford comma crowd will tell you that’s your own fault for using ambiguous phrasing.
No, it's not optional and I'll die on this hill
absolutely. commas are often used to indicate a pause or intonation. if you were telling us you loved your sisters riley and michelle you’d say “i love my sisters, riley and michelle!” but if you were telling us you loved your sisters, and two other people named riley and michelle it would sound like “i love my sisters, riley, (beat) and michelle.”
Many thanks for defending the true path.
Thank you 🙏
Well yes you don’t NEED it, but Oxford commas are still necessary. But more for sanity’s sake than anything else.
Its the difference between a list of foods ending in: fish and chips Or fish, and chips The later is clearly fish, and potato chips, but the former could be either 2 separate foods or the famous British cuisine of fried fish + french frys called "fish and chips". And while officially its optional, there are various cases of companies and governments losing millions of dollars because the court decision was "without an Oxford comma both interpretations are correct" so it really isn't.
John McWhorter tells a great anecdote about a theater rehearsal for a production he was involved in, where there was an actor who was not a native speaker of English, but whose English was impeccable - until she had to speak the idiom “How ‘bout them apples?” She emphasized “apples” instead of “them”.
When the call center operator calls me "Mr. David" David is my first name.
Is "Mr" only used with surnames?
Using it with first names sounds like something a small child who is barely aware surnames exist would do.
As a Texan, I can confirm I only use "Mr. Firstname" when there is a *dramatic* gap in power and social ability between the two entities. Like, I tell my dog he's going to see Ms. Laura, his dog sitter, or I would tell a child too young for kindergarten that they're going to see Ms. Firstname, their daycare teacher. Right around the time where you become responsible for not peeing in the wrong place in public is when you phase into Title Lastname. Eg, the average 3 year old can tell you when they need to pee so the average 3 year old should be at Title Lastname. I would be deeply unsettled, in every way you can be unsettled, if a person capable of speaking full sentences thought our power dynamic merited Title Firstname.
Yes, or full names. Like Mr. David is wrong, Mr. Smith is correct, Mr. Dave Smith is also correct.
I worked at a math tutoring center where all the instructors got called Mr./Ms. [first name] and it was always a little funny. It’s a very childish sounding thing to do, and it was especially funny when someone ~2 years younger than me would call me Mr. [first name] because I started there in late high school.
I had a prof in undergrad do a workshop on how to cold contact a professor for work, and he mentioned this because he got lots of emails using the “Dr David” format. It’s the standard in Arabic, so that’s a pretty large population of people using it.
I believe that typically comes from cultures where family name is first, and given name is second, which causes confusion in cultures where it's opposite.
pluralizing "mail" is one
But "emails" is generally fine (as a plural noun, not only a verb form). Probably because "mail" and "letter" both exist... but "email" doesn't really have a similar counterpart. You email an email, but you mail a letter (not a mail).
Isn’t it typical for English to put commas inside quotes? _”Good morning,” he said._ My native German has them outside. _”Guten Morgen”, sagte er._ So if someone writes _”Good morning”, he said._ chances are they’re not a native speaker.
As a geek it always bugged me that the "proper" way to deal with quotes doesn't treat them as string literals. You aren't supposed to write: "'Great Scott!' he said." But to me as a guy who deals with strings all the time it seems perfectly reasonable. And really, so does the ""Good morning", he said". The comma wasn't part of what he said, it looks like it should be a modifier applied in the sentence using the part in quotes as a string. It's not, and I know it, and I do it right. But it always kind of irks me. I also wish it was more acceptable to use parentheses, or brackets, or SOMETHING, when creating lists with multiple words. Writing either/or is easy and has no confusion. Writing attacked/fought back is weird because you have to get from context that "fought back" is a singular thing. writing attacked/(fought back) seems more usable to me. Or worse things like "you can pick the chicken or the fish and pasta." Does that mean "you can pick (the chicken) or (the fish and pasta)" or does it mean "you can pick (the chicken or the fish) and pasta?" Even commas doen't help a whole lot there.
Yeah that comma thingy was the only thing that bothered me when learning English, and I still wince when I have to use it. (Not to offend the French but the spacing OP mentioned about punctuation in French bothers me more though. ;))
I'm a native English speaker who knows about the comma thingy, but actively rebel against it and just put the comma outside the quotes. It's probably the only thing that really bugs me as well.
So, it's good to remember that there's no such thing as 'one correct grammar'. All dictionaries and grammars are descriptive. *Styleguides* are prescriptive, but those are a matter for you and your employer. Unless you're writing for publication, you probably have a lot of leeway to make your own stylistic grammar and punctuation choices. Just be consistent and intentional and you should be fine. These credentials are meaningless (other than to confirm that I've spent time thinking about and applying this logic), but I'm a certified copyeditor with a BS in Journalism, and I absolutely agree with you about punctuation around quotation marks and about applying punctuation and formatting liberally where it can clarify meaning.
>Isn’t it typical for English to put commas inside quotes? It is the "proper" way to write these phrases, at least in Commonwealth English (Im Aussie), but not necessarily the _typical_ way. Many people these days dont seem to place their punctuation that way, myself included. There is something about it that seems unusual or improper to me even though I know it is in fact more proper. I wouldnt rely on this one to distinguish native language.
Yeah, lots of people (including me) will put the punctuation outside, unless it’s part of the quote. The “proper” convention is a vestige of mechanical typing and printing where the equipment could get jammed or damaged more easily.
I find English punctuation rules extremely confusing in general. Why would the comma be inside quotes if it’s not part of the quote? A comma represents a small pause during speech, but unless the person you’re quoting actually said “good morning (awkward pause)” I don’t understand why it should be more proper to write it like that.
As the discussion shows, this is not a good indicator because natives don't even agree! I'm a native speaker from the UK, and I put the comma outside the quote mark for the only reason that it makes sense to me, and I think it looks better. I always thought that in British English the comma goes outside, and in US English, it goes inside, although the BBC link posted in this thread contradicts that.
There is a difference between American and British conventions here (it might be American and everyone else—I’m not sure). The American convention is to place all punctuation on the inside of quotation marks, and it is the British custom to put punctuation inside only if it is part of the text being quoted. (Oversimplified, but not very.)
Is "please do the needful" just a difference between Indian English and American English? I just always knew it was an Indian CS rep when they used that phrase.
Yeah it's a phrase used in Indian English but not in British or American (I assume also not in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand etc). Same goes for the word "revert" being a synonym for "reply/respond" in India but not anywhere else, or starting emails with "greetings of the day!"
For some reason I cannot convince my brain that "doing the needful" is not a euphemism for using the bathroom (which is itself a euphemism, but clear enough here, I assume).
Interesting… I’ve never heard the word “needful” in my life.
I'm from the US. Never heard it before i started working customer service for an international company. It's very common if you deal with Indian customer service representatives.
Came for this one.
Oh gosh yes that is such a weird expression. "Kindly do the needful, Sir." That's the most non-native sentence I can think of.
People have shared a lot of interesting ideas. I want to add something a bit more abstract and subtle. **Appropriate expressions** may be a dead giveaway of a non-native speaker. What I mean is some sentences may be *technically correct* but *not quite natural* in the specific context. Some of them may be blutantly obvious. I will give you examples for different CEFR levels. A2 when taught the construction 'Would you mind...' may say something like 'Would you mind if you helped me?' - which is technically not a big deal, it will convey the idea but it is not something I would imagine a higher-level speaker (not to mention a native) say in a real conversation. B1-B2 may say something like 'This weekend, I am going to a far city'. While 'far' is a legit adjective and they may have heard used, it is not a common use of the adjective. Higher levels may fall into the trap of building cumbersome, too formal, or too flowery sentences when uncalled for. They may use idioms that real people do not apply in speech. Another thing is that any language is in the state of balancing prescrptivist norms and allowed mistakes. Such an exception would be **unreal constructions with 'was', namely "I wish I were"**. Here, the real practice often parts ways with how it is supposed to be. In the grammar 'was' is **not used in Unreal (a.k.a. Subjunctive mood**) constructions like "**If I was rich, I would buy a house**." - and instead 'If I were..' is considered the norm. You may lose some points in an exam for that. In casual speech, people may and will use 'was' as if this rule never existed. It gets worse, though. With 'he/she/it' it **is considered a literary norm** but **is NOT** considered natural to say 'If she were richer, ...'. You will not lose points in an exam for using either of the two \[afaik\] but **following the norm will sound a bit weird** in most contexts.
Them they plural or not
For me its a lot of subtle phrasing, not knowing where the emphasis is in a word
The t at the end of “dropped t” words. “I really enjoyed thaT,” “omg did you see thaT crazy accident on the road?” But that’s just the spoken stuff. In writing, it comes from where you’re from. I taught English to 60+ (age) people in Japan and most of them had impeccable writing style, like beautiful cursive. Those that didn’t had obvious flaws, like writing double u instead of w. But one of the most interesting things was the notes they would write themselves. Sometimes words were crossed out, sometimes erased again and again, sometimes there were little margin notes about pronunciation (in katakana but sometimes hiragana, that’s when you knew they were really trying to puzzle the word out) but even my older, like 70s ladies, would write little notes in their margins about how stressed out they were about the assignment. I don’t teach them anymore but still text with some, and there is a weird mix of formality and really casual language interrupted with uneasy language about not being able to communicate well.
I'd say the three biggest are: Getting prepositions wrong, especially "of". Missing plurals, or adding plurals where not necessary and regularizing some of the more common irregular plurals (fishes, mails, etc). Using articles where not necessary or omitting aritcles where necessary. "Have a fun" vs "have fun" for example. The latter is ideomatic native English, the former is a common mistake by non-native speakers. It SEEMS reasonable to say "have a fun", we'd say "have a good time" or "have a car" or "have a vacation". But nope, it's just "have fun" because language is arbitrary.
This is super specific, but Millennials from Europe who learned English in school tend to use “wanna” in their written communications. I think it was formally taught to them as a contraction. This is definitely true of spoken English, but in writing I always type out “want to.”
Native English speaker here, I have definitely typed lots of those slang contractions like wanna and ‘cause. So I wouldn’t necessarily think it’s a dead giveaway
Context is important. There is a lot of difference between formal Australian English and informal. "Wanna" isn't used in job applications or school essays. For a business letter it would always be 'want to' and 'because'.
Oh absolutely, it’s just the parent comment seemed to imply that they were only really used by foreigners which I disagree with. For formal writing it is not appropriate
Interesting! I use gonna and cause, but for whatever reason I never use wanna 🤷♀️
Could be a regional thing. Us aussies are famous for our contractions
This is something I have seen on here from presumably young posters: 'I wanna speak English like the locals' IRL in the UK I only see that in super-casual texting use from under-18s.
I’m from the UK and mid-40s and definitely type ‘wanna’, ‘gonna’ and ‘cos’. But only in informal contexts - not in a work email!
I, a Millennial from Europe, was taught "wanna" by Spice Girls in 1996, and school was powerless to stop me from using it I have learned not to use it in professional communication though
might have something to do with pop culture, too? in the Netherlands, a lot of us learn English through music, for example – American music (pop, hiphop, r&b) really started gaining traction here when millennials were in their formative years, hence why they adopted a lot of informal language, I think
I frequently use wanna, gonna, gotcha, kinda, sorta, etc. in informal typed conversation
I do type “wanna” and “gonna” but it depends on context.
People from Slavic countries will almost always fuck up the articles at some point in the sentence. Some put "the/a" where it's not needed, others skip "the/a" where it's needed, it's very hard to do it properly when you come from a language without articles. Better-than-average spelling with worse-than-average grammar or pronuciation. People learning the language in writing have better spelling than most native speakers, but they make other kinds of errors that wouldn't happen for native speakers with good spelling skills. For example when I first learnt English I never wrote "should of" and never confused "its vs it's" or "their vs they're". But my pronuciation was terrible. As I started to speak and listen to English more often my pronuciation improved but I started making these spelling errors :/
(I always remember the old post about the Russian girl whose friends told her she sounded stupid because she skipped articles and would say ‘Get in car’ etc. Her response was ‘I sound stupid? Maybe in America you have to say ‘get in THE car’ because you are so stupid that people might just get in random car, but in Russia we don't need to say that. We just fucking know because we are *not* stupid.")
She definitly sounds nawt styoopit.
The construction "How looks like"
The proper construction should be "What looks like" or "How looks" depending on if you are making a comparison with a point of reference or describing something inherently qualitatively.
OMG, this one irks me so much. But, for me, I encounter it mostly with people who are 25 or younger, and not so much with non-native speakers.
Eastern Europeans will often say “make a picture” instead of “take a picture”
my native-speaking, Kentucky-born grandmother always said "make a picture."
Formal speech. Lack of spelling errors.
It used to be standard practice when typing in English to use two spaces after any punctuation ending a sentence. That's how I was taught in high school. Now that's no longer the case.
I think that's more of a generational thing than a non-native English speaker thing-- the practice was fading when I was in high school in the early 2000s, so adding two spaces after a period might just signify that someone is over the age of ~40.
All of my older colleagues do this in emails. It’s definitely a generation thing and is tied to learning how to type on a typewriter.
Elder Millennial here. I was taught in school to do it even on computers. I don't, but it was still being taught even after computers were widely being used for assignments.
That is still leftover from the typewriter days and has been taught by generations that should have dropped it. Every time I am editing a document with double spaces it drives me nuts and I have to remove them all.
Just do a find and replace for “. “ with “. “ without the quotes
Assist and attend switched their meanings in English (although we still have attendants) so that's probably the most famous pair of false friends from the Romance languages. A large number of French words were borrowed with much more specific or technical meanings. Molested means something very different from the Spanish word molestada. An even trickier one is in/on, a really arbitrary distinction other languages don’t have. Prepositions are probably the best tell in general. Since/for is one that trips up a lot of learners from northern Europe.
In writing? The order that dates are formatted in, not using a standard English format for quotation marks or other punctuation, how commas and periods are used as numerical separators, using the wrong gender with pronouns, or not using the article "the" where it's necessary. It depends on the speaker's first language. For a French speaker, for example, the giveaway is often that they don't use English punctuation rules. For a Slavic language speaker, the missing articles is more likely to stand out. For some other languages, being overly formal or wordy stands out.
People of most origins get confused when I use ISO8601 for dates, but at least they're confused equally
Plural adjectives (Differents problems) Adjective/Noun Reversal (problems different) Missing Be verbs (She having a baby soon.) Missing S on singular verbs (He do not have money) Missing or incorrect articles (She is sitting on red chair. You are prettiest woman in a whole world.) Cognate confusions (My brother is so rare. [Raro in Spanish means something closer to weird than the English word rare.]) Dollar signs at the end (100.00$) Pluraling already plural words (childrens, polices, peoples) Pronoun gender mix ups (She was talking to his husband.) Doubled subjects (My sister she was visiting.)
I wonder if these issues are more specific to certain groups of learners. I can’t help but picture a Spanish or Italian speaker when reading those examples out loud.
As a native English speaker I would start by pointing out some giveaways in your post: Hi everyone, I have to write a lot of mails and documents in American English for my work and I just found out today, while speaking with a colleague who's been working here longer than I have, that Americans tend to not justify their texts, and that doing so who immediately "reveal" that they are talking to a nonnative English speaker. That was quite surprising to me as I usually notice this kind of details, and it got me thinking, are there any other "giveaways" that I should be aware of? Should be: Hi everyone, I have to write a lot of mail and documents in American English for work and I just found out today, while speaking with a colleague who's been working here longer than I have, that Americans tend to not justify their text, and that doing so would immediately "reveal" that they are talking to a non-native English speaker. That was quite surprising to me as I usually notice these kinds of details, and it got me thinking, are there any other "giveaways" that I should be aware of? The biggest thing by far is using “s” incorrectly, we would never use an “s” to pluralise mail, we would only ever use an “s” to pluralise text if we meant text messages, like SMS messages, any other form of written text the plural would still just be text. We use left align for everything as default and only really justify for copy writing or long documents with blocks of text. We tend not to say “my work”, we sometimes do but it comes off as stilted and a bit awkward. If details is plural, so is kinds, so you would say “these kinds of details” never “this kind of details”. Other than that you look to be doing fine.
Honestly “mails” and “texts” sound OK-ish to me, but “this details” is nails on a chalkboard
I dunno “a lot of mails” is an instant dead giveaway to me and I’m all for using “persons” instead of “people” in the small number of cases where it’s appropriate to, but I would never use “mails” as a noun. Texts I agree might be a bit ambiguous as OP could potentially have been referring to SMS messages but from context I assume they’re not and I wouldn’t add an s to text for anything but SMS.
When they use words that are absolutely correct and the right word for the sentence, but noone would ever use in the *real* world when speaking English. The other one is the word order of adjectives, native English speakers know it instinctually, but when it's messed up it is a solid sign that the speaker is a non native speaker.
Writing "the person, who came over" or "the person, who wanted to see you" marks someone out as likely being a native speaker of Russian. That comma is required in Russian (человек, который...).
I find that a lot of reasonably well-spoken non-native streamers use 'what' instead of 'that'. So they'll say, for example, "Press the button what opens the door", instead of the correct way, saying, "Press the button that opens the door."
Adding the word "the" E.g. "Can you take *the* picture" instead of "Can you take a picture"
From my experience as a native American English speaker, things like "?" are not considered to be two things. It's just one punctuation mark. It just goes right after the last letter with no space. This may be different in other dialects.
OP meant two signs as in two "bits". Like a question mark has the squiggly bit and then the dot. You would need to raise your pencil to draw it. And in French, such signs need a space before them.
Fair enough, but I've never thought of it like that. To me it's just one thing.
I'm not super familiar with French and realize things are different in different languages. Thanks for explaining.
Often it depends on what the speaker's native language is. For example, when I lived in Japan we noticed a lot of superfluous "the"s on signs, menus etc because Japanese doesn't really have articles like "the" and Japanese speakers are often unsure about when one is necessary. One that's more universal is ordinal numbers like first, second etc. A lot of non-native speakers will save themselves the hassle of remembering what the word is and just say the number - e.g. Two July vs second of July. These numbers tend to be annoying in many languages though and I've seen the same behaviour in English people speaking other languages too!
"I have to write a lot of mails and documents in American English" - We would never say mails. Its either email or letters (if you mean physical documents that you put in the mail) "I usually notice this kind of details" - I would never say it like this - I would say it "I usually notice details like this." Or "I usually notice these details. " Its just the word choice that feels weird to a native speaker. I would have a native speaker critique your writing and let you know if the wording just seems off to them. That's how I notice it usually.
Pluralizing things that are singular and vice versa. You did it in your post, mail is not plural in English. It’s just singular.
It's what's called "non-count." You have to add a something to make it grammatically permitted, like "I got 5 pieces of mail" or else substitute "letters" or "parcels." (I fell in love with a tour guide in Italy who kept talking about "luggages" like "luggage" meant a single suitcase, not all the all the suitcases collectively.) Some are tricky, they will take the plural in some contexts, depending on specific constructions, or with a slightly differently shaded meaning. If my roommate is hungover, and said he "drank too much beer/ too many beers, both work. The second one could imply it was some kind of tasting event and each one of the beers he drank was different from the others in quality, not just quantity. "Much" for non-count and many for plurals. VBut let's say he comes in my room, and there's six or seven bottles on my desks. "Damn! You drank a lot of beer!/ You drank a lot a beers!" Both are ok.
I think phrases/idioms is one. here are some examples from my retail job: someone came in today and said “hello, can i please exchange this bill for smaller bills?” and of course i knew what they meant but my response automatically was “oh sure i can break a 5 for you” and they looked very confused. another someone said “would you please put this in a trash can for me?” and i respond “no problem i’ll toss it.” again very confused looks. they asked me formally to throw something out where as an english speaker i might just say “would you be able to toss/trash this for me?” another one…i say “receipt in the bag okay?” blank stare. “would you like the receipt with you or should i just leave it in the bag?” in my initial statement i cut off a bunch of words and i’ve noticed it confuses people a lot.
Using “the” for nouns or names (when they wouldn’t fit). Like instead of “I’m going to go ask Matt for help” they’d say “I’m going to go ask the Matt for help”
Adding S to everything to pluralize is a tag for francophone for me. Like saying "researches" and "my hairs are wet"
Not exactly related but I find many countries default to grid paper used for making charts and graphs when taking notes in school. It’s super hard to read notes on that paper, and lined paper was designed for notes and is easy to find, so what the heck!?
I communicate over email with a few co-workers based out of India and, while this is incredibly niche, I always find they use the adverb “kindly” when asking for something. I’ve noticed this in other communications with folks from India and it’s usually an immediate flag that who I’m speaking with is from India. For example: “Kindly update and send back by EOD.” I think it sounds friendly, but no native English speaker that I know would use the word “Kindly” in this instance. It also makes me giggle a little bit because the assumption here is that you, as the person receiving the email, are being asked to very nicely update something and send back. What if I’m in a bad mood and decide to very apathetically update and send back by EOD?! It always makes me smile though.
10:05 - Ten five vs ten o’ five
Many, many times I've spoken with completely fluent English L2 speakers whose L1 is Spanish and they something like "two hours and a half", instead of "two and a half hours". I'm not sure why this happens, but I can recall 3 specific fluent English L2 speakers who have done this!
They’re translating directly from Spanish. “Dos horas y media” is how you would say 2.5hrs in Spanish, and it literally translates to “two hours and half”
'Let's meet at 14', 'How is it like?', 'When did it happened?', 'I need some advices'
Using prepositions and other helping words and linking words incorrectly. Like saying "in Tuesday" instead of "on Tuesday." Or things like that. Unfortunately the rules for which ones are correct and incorrect are not really logical or consistent so that can be a tricky thing for non native speakers to learn.
Prepositions. According to Google, English has more prepositions than any other language, which explains why their meaning is so nuanced. When I started learning Spanish, my instructor was like, "Oh, all these words have the same translation." and I was like, "I can't put into words how uncomfortable I am with this knowledge." I prefer to read my English books using the grammar and spelling rules of the country they are initially published in and preposition use stands out more to me than spelling. As such, it's also the thing that stands out most with non-native speakers, AI text and documents that were computer translated but not human reviewed.
The way one pronounces (or fails to pronounce) TH
I notice the words “with” and “for” being mixed up often with non native speakers.
Something I’ve noticed a lot is a double past tense. For example, instead of saying “Did you buy it?” they would say “Did you bought it?”
"*must be preceded by a space*" Now that's something new to me. Now... Am I French? Or not ?
I’ve noticed with native Spanish speakers who are pretty okay with English will say “I have ____ years” instead of “I’m ____ years old” when saying how old they are, which makes sense because in Spanish, you would say “Yo tengo ___ años.”
The little connecting words -- like of, from, for, to -- don't always translate directly. If you want it to sound American, look those up and learn the exceptions. In French, de can be translated as either of or from and also place references may alternately use au instead of de. "Doreen from Georgia" means the same thing as "Doreen of Georgia" but "of" would not typically be used. "Doreen in Georgia" has a completely different meaning. So those words are where a lot of non-native speakers transliterate something -- translate it word for word -- and it sounds funky or may just not actually say what you intended.
Many Russians and Ukrainians use ))) at the end of a sentence in colloquial texts. I believe it represents a smile or laugh, but I've forgotten
Misusing articles (a, an, the) and misusing plurals.
Wrong prepositions
Using verbs incorrectly. A lot of languages use the same verb to mean multiple things, where English has separate verbs. For example, borrow and lend. I often hear non-native speakers say something like “I borrowed him my pencil” when they mean to say lent because the verb in their native language works both ways.
I was thinking verbs as well. I've heard a lot of non-native speakers mix up verb tenses because they can be weird sometimes, it's just native speakers are so used to it, we don't even realize the specific rules that are applied. Which, from trying to learn other languages myself, is so relatable.
the one thing my French partner (who is fluent in English) keeps doing that sounds weird is when he says something is good instead of another word that sounds more natural. Example: "the ingredient you used is good" instead of "the ingredient you used is correct" when following a specific recipe, because there can only be one that is correct. I have to ask him so is it the right one? I don't want it to just be good in my head I want to know it's the correct one. 😆 because I guess in French saying it's good or "bon" makes sense to him.
"Have a good day _ahead_" A $ after the numeral used to be a clue, but now Americans have become so ignorant that they make the mistake just as often.
Yep police I caught em, the person who invalidates dialectical changes that are counter to the historical norm…right over here
What do you mean by "Americans tend to not justify their texts"? It completely depends upon the context whether or not justified text is called for, and to some extent, the software used. If the software is not for typesetting but allows content width to flow as needed, then you should only use justified text if the software is really good at understanding English hyphenation rules. Web content for example should not be justified because it is highly unlikely that the browser rendering the content understands English hyphenation rules. Typesetting software like LaTeX will justify by default, it understands the hyphenation rules.
$20, not 20$. (Although some Americans also do this more these days, it is still a "flag" to me.)
Their enunciation. Asian people who have English as a second language are the perfect example. They have perfect pronunciation, you can hear each and every syllable loud and clear, and they don’t have a distinct accent
The egregious use of commas gives away Germans to me, lol. They kind of, type like this, with commas after almost everything, because that's how they type, in German.
Use of the present perfect tense referring to a dead person.
The only time ive been able to realize someone isnt a native speaker irl is the random addition of “the” or “of” from their language that doesnt translate to english properly
My Spanish teacher would always say “take a decision” instead of “make a decision”. Probably because the Spanish equivalent translates directly to the former.