Star The 10 Most Annoying Things in Internet Comments
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 4th Aug 2009 16:32 UTC
Humor Since I think we haven't been having enough fun lately on OSNews, I decided it's time we do something fun for a change. We all have our little pet annoyances when it comes to other people's comments. Fixed expressions or comment styles that annoy the living daylights out of you. Here are mine.
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RE[2]: What about Post-parsing?
by Luis on Tue 4th Aug 2009 20:43 UTC in reply to "RE: What about Post-parsing?"
Luis
Member since:
2006-04-28

However, as English is not a first language for many fellow participants in Internet forums... I feel that it is courteous to make a correction here and there, in a good-natured way, as an addendum to a response on the main topic. Constructive feedback can be very helpful to one using a second language.


I don't usually like people correcting others, though I agree it can be done nicely in certain situations, but the funny thing is that most of us non native English speakers don't make the most usual type of mistakes that you find out there.

People who use then when they mean than, your when they mean you're, alot when they mean a lot and (my personal favorite) should of when they mean should've are mostly (but not only) American. Which is natural, since foreigners learn the language by studying/reading, and we pronounce the words as they're spelled (with our own accents), while native speakers learn by listening and only later they learn to write.

IOW, for an American, then and than (and the other examples) sound pretty similar when they learn to speak, while for a Spaniard (and presumably German, French, Russian...) they simply sound (and look) different (because of our strong accents and because we first learned the word written on paper).

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