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?
Most of the people you interact with online aren’t native English speakers.
Increased reliance on touch screen devices with dodgy autocorrect probably accounts for a good chunk of it.
I know it is not uncommon for me to have to go back and edit something I wrote from my phone after I submit it because I didn’t see the autocorrect mistake before hitting send.
You are going crazy. I’ve been on the internet since like 1992 and have spent many, many years reading forums and playing text-based role playing games, and this is very not new. Spelling has always been awful because the internet isn’t a formal medium where that stuff matters to most people. If anything it’s probably gotten better since the advent of smart phones with built in auto-correct.
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.
Lemmy seems to have a pretty high number of non-native English speakers, particularly Germans and other Europeans. I think this leads to people making seemingly simple grammar mistakes while also appearing to know English well.
Plus, American schools have completely gone to shit, so I’m sure that doesn’t help either.
This was going to my answer as well. While spelling on the internet is pretty bad, English isn’t the primary language of many people on Lemmy.
I think that it’s mostly just Lemmy being less dominated by native English speakers. Many of those mistakes that seem baffling “make sense” in some other languages
I’m not native English. It’s imperfect English or writing in other language that not many would fully understand.
I think this is finally being corrected, but for decades kids have been taught “whole word reading” rather than phonics. The basic idea is that instead of learning how to sound out words, they should look at the first letter and guess what they think the word might be based on context/pictures. The proponents of this method claim kids will memorize words as “whole words” and eventually be able to read.
So, they can’t actually read. But they know how to look like they can read.
When you can’t read it’s not enjoyable, so you read less. When you read less you come across fewer words, which you don’t really know how to decode anyway because you were never taught.
Anyway these kids are now adults, and even the ones who are smart still struggle with spelling and reading.
Check out the podcast Sold a Story, really interesting investigation on this topic.
Phonics is dogshit and it’s being phased out in favour of whole word reading here.
You should not learn spelling by “sounding out” much of anything, you should learn it through reading text and remembering how words are spelt.
You might want to look at the latest research. Its not favorable after decades of data from “whole word” reading techniques education.
you should learn it through reading text and remembering how words are spelled.
Thats the concept of “whole word”, yes, but in practice it severely limits vocabulary and comprehension apparently. That real world data tells the tale.
Don’t forget the internet is global. People for whom English is a second language are much more common than they once were.
Yes yes you and many others have pointed this dumb take out already. I’m also a second language English speaker, and no one in my family even speaks English or ever has, and I’d never make a mistake like this.
Came here to say that.
