This is quite recent but I’ve been browsing Lemmy a bunch lately and quite often I see extreme grammatical errors.
I’m not talking about like, incorrect stylistic choices between commas and dashes, or an improper use of ellipses or missing commas or incorrect use of apostrophes in its/it’s or in multiple posessive articles or just plain typos or any nitpicky grammar nazi shit like that, but just basic spelling specifically.
It’s one thing when you can’t spell some pretty uncommon words and you’re too lazy to look it up and/or use autocorrect, but it’s a completely different league to misspell very basic words, very recently I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?
And it’s not been an isolated thing either, I’ve seen several instances like that lately.
Am I going crazy? Is it just me?
OP’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
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
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 in English than it is spelling the words correctly, especially with auto correct and syntax highlighting
Apparently this post is not an example of that issue since your sentence structure in this comment is perfect.
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
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 as the cause
Schools literally prefer to hire foreigners as English teachers because their English is better.
Just because a school has an entire ESL department taught by ESL speakers does not mean all ESL speakers are qualified to teach ESL.
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 basically only conpleted 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.
And this will get worse.
Covid resulted in a year to two years of remote or missed classes for Gen Alpha, and the Repulicans look poised to finally kill off the public education system in all but the wealthier, solid blue states. Department of Education will be disbanded by the end of the year or earlier if nobody stops it.
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.
Bruh slept through 13 years of English lessons 😂
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.
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.
That would depend on how long they’ve been studying the language for, and their goals/needs in language learning. Someone who needed to learn English and pass formal tests for the sake of employment or immigration will eventually reach that level, but someone who either hasn’t been studying that long or doesn’t consider it a critical priority because they’re just browsing English websites and media for fun might not.
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.
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. I’m also not a native English speaker at all, my mother tongue doesn’t even share the Latin alphabet
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
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.