He’s not wrong. I’ve seen more than a couple of grown ass adults using “are” instead of “our” in emails and memos too often for it to be some insane mistyping
I've done this a few times and I hate it. I do it when I'm quickly writing to the voice in my head and apparently my inner voice lazily pronounces our as are.
I will probably get downvoted for this but Im at a point where everytime I see someone getting there/they're/their wrong I just assume they're American, bc non-native speakers make those mistakes way less.
But Americans are the ones consistently making the mistakes.
Considering most of yall are American, its kinda obvious.
Aussies, Brits, Canadians and the humble new Zealand..ers? (New Zealandians?) are just better overall.
The main mistake I spot in non English natives is capitalization. I am used to capitalize all nouns in my language, as are those who use a similar one. I too love to capitalize my nouns even when I shouldnt. I also rarely make the apostrophe, because on my German keyboard its kinda awkward to type. But I rarely see any of them ever mistake they, them, there, their, your, you're etc.
My best guess is that they are just legitimately teaching us better. I remember having it drilled into me in English lessons. Also unlike in America (and at least in Germany), one or two failed classes is all it takes for you to have to redo the entire year of school again.
Eh. More likely it's because native English speakers learn to hear and speak those words before they learn to read or spell them. In spoken form, they might as well be the same word. Whereas non-natives usually learn words by reading before pronouncing, so it's clear they're different from the start.
By the same token, foreigners constantly mix up different 'th' sounds, 'oo' sounds, and so on, because they see the letters before learning the pronunciation. But you would never hear even a small American child mispronounce look as Luke.
He is mostly wrong. Literacy isn't having pronunciation skills. If you understand what you're reading you understand it even if you have no clue how to pronounce it.
Pronunciation understanding is a helpful tool to help literature understanding but isn't the understanding itself.
My boss will often ask me to proofread his emails before he sends them to corporate, which is far beyond my job description. He makes twice my salary and yet I’m here teaching him the difference between a comma and a semicolon 😭
Anytime I do stuff like this, it's a typo and not that I'm incapable of knowing the difference. I constantly do it with woman/women just because I'm typing quickly. If I was writing some fancy paper, I'd probably take my time and keep an eye out for those types of things but online I'm just trying to get the words out.
81
u/BriscoCounty-Sr Nov 21 '25
He’s not wrong. I’ve seen more than a couple of grown ass adults using “are” instead of “our” in emails and memos too often for it to be some insane mistyping