I’ve always experienced the opposite - native English speakers are horrible at spelling because they don’t have to put any effort into comprehending the language, vs non-native speakers who frequently have to take ESL tests for either academia, work, or immigration, and therefore had more exposure to spelling practice.
Comment on Am I going crazy, or has people's spelling gotten awful lately?
makyo@lemmy.world 5 days agoOP’s browsing habits likely recently changed to a place on the web with more English as a second language users. Those kinds of misspellings are pretty common with people who learned a lot of their English from streaming Youtube and other online shows
lemmyng@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
annette_runner@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Bruh slept through 13 years of English lessons 😂
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Lessons are forgotten fast. Ask an adult to do 3 digit multiplication and watch them fumble. Ask about geometry and they’ll ask Google for a calculator. I don’t remember how to do projectile physics. All the same for English. If all a person does is speak the language while writing very simple messages (in comparison to English essays), the memory of complex synthesis is lost fast. If they’re not continuing to do those tasks in life, it’s gone.
annette_runner@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I agree. My experience doesn’t really align with the idea that ESL learners are better spellers. English is a conventional language, so it’s not like there is a dictated spelling. Spelling is just a convention.
libra00@lemmy.world 5 days ago
My guess is it’s just the frequency illusion, because they’re also super common among Americans who have only ever spoken English from birth. My theory is that these types of misspellings (like ‘itsplain’ instead of ‘explain’) are from folks who don’t read a lot and therefore seem to be guessing on spelling based on what they’ve (mis)heard rather than having seen it on the page/screen enough to notice the correct spelling.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
No they haven’t changed at all. I’ve been using mostly Lemmy as my one and only SM for most of the past year and this is a very new phenomenon to me.
makyo@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Well I guess I don’t know the timing but I wouldn’t be surprised it Lemmy was it - there are a bunch of non-native English speakers here
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Are you fucking dense? I just told you that I’m also ESL, I don’t make such typos, it’s no excuse at all and makes it make not an iota more sense than saying the pigs are flying hence people’s spelling fell off a fucking cliff.
Lemmy is def not it, I moved here a year or more ago, the spelling has gotten very bad very recently and I only use this platform pretty much and this is where I’ve seen it the most by far.
Arcane2077@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
It’s the opposite. People learning English as a second language are typically much better spellers. Only a native speaker would misspell extreme that way
independantiste@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
As a non native English speaker I have more difficulty constructing my sentences in ways that make sense in English. It’s a lot harder to put my ideas into text in a coherent way that sounds right than it is spelling the words correctly especially with auto correct and syntax highlighting
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Apparently this post is not an example of that issue since your sentence structure in this comment is perfect.
CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
I get the problem you’re describing, it does happen to me as well, but OP is specifically talking about spelling, which I generally do find to be worse in posts from native speakers
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I think you’re overestimating the average quality of English as a second/third language education. The internet continuously becomes more accessible across the globe, which has overlap with lower quality and lower frequency of English lessons. There’s more exposure from speakers that don’t use the same native alphabet as well, so use is not so universal. When speaking is the primary use of language, reading is secondary, and writing is tertiary, mistakes get interesting. It’s not too hard to hear the word “extreme” but visualize the spelling from words like dream, team, cream, or beam, all words I could see being more commonly used than extreme. It’s easier to learn “very” as a modifier to a common adjective.
Source: I work in the US with mixed central/south American-born employees and travel to Mexico often. I see casual US-sourced mistakes, of course, as well as those distinctly from Spanish-speaking writers. My Spanish is just as incorrect. If you can say it out loud and still make sense, I’ll vote for non-native English speakers every time
starlinguk@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Schools literally prefer to hire foreigners as English teachers because their English is better.
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Just because a school has an entire ESL department taught by ESL speakers does not mean all ESL speakers are qualified to teach ESL.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
American here:
About 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, 2nd grade or worse reading and writing skills.
The average literacy level of Americans is between 5th and 6th grade… meaning the next 30% have the reading/writing skills of someone who only did elementary school.
These are numbers for adults 18 and up, by the way, not kids.
Almost every single person I’ve met who learned English as a second language… can speak it more fluently than most native English speakers I’ve known who grew up in America. More extensive vocabularies, better grammar, better spelling.