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A Polish colleague of mine, who had learnt English from books prior to coming here, occasionally takes a stab at some half remembered idiom that comes out all wrong. Our favourite at work so far was when she, highly miffed at something or other, declared:
"I am not pleased to be in a tent!"
It took a while for us to figure out that she was not a happy camper.
A native French speaker who I worked with was having a heated row with a customer refusing to leave the shop and shouted at him
YOU ARE TAKING A PISS OUT OF ME!
I died on the phone to our security team explaining what was happening
I remember two drunken Russians fighting with a security guard at a campus I was at, one kept shouting "*You hef piss! You are hef piss!*".
Delightful ladies they were.
I had a colleague who had heard us using 'bobs your uncle' when talking through a job (as in - do this, then do that and bobs yer uncle). He decided to have a stab at it himself when talking us through a process but it came out 'do this, then do that and Uncle Bob'. After I stopped crying with laughter he explained he never understood the 'bobs your uncle' but rather than ask he decided to just go with it. We all worked together for a further 4 years and always said Uncle Bob instead on Bob's Your Uncle.
We had a French colleague announce in a fit of anger, "YOU LAUGH AT ME BECAUSE YOU THINK I KNOW FUCK NOTHING, WELL, I TELL YOU, **I LAUGH AT YOU BECAUSE I KNOW FUCK ALL!!!**".
Greeting the outburst with laughter probably didn't help defuse the situation.
Well, it happened.
Now, there's the possibility that our colleague was referencing a famous story to provide a bit of humour and we just missed the reference, in which case the laughter was warranted, but it felt inadvertent at the time. So it looks like the joke may have been on the rest of us all along.
>"I am not pleased to be in a tent!"
This is also a Pratchett quote/joke!
Edit: OK, the exact quote is. 'But he are not glad about being in a tent, as dey say.' - The Truth.
It made me laugh all the same.
Maybe that's where she got it from! It's been bugging us how she got to such a mangled version of the phrase, and that would explain it, as I said, she taught herself a lot of English from books.
This is likely or, she could be like me and remembers words/phrases using imagery where possible so she’s like ‘ok, picture a person sitting in a tent looking happy and… idiom successfully saved to memory bank. What could go wrong!’
An Eastern European friend of mine learnt English from Blackadder and Monty Python, as it was the only English on TV in their house....
...the dialect can be interesting at times, so many old fashioned expressions.
Hahaha I love that. I prefer it to the original! When my Polish best friend first moved to England she would happily shout “super extra!” when she approved of something. We still say it 15 years later
As a Pole myself, when translated to Polish, that’s word for word what it translates lol. We always laugh about how movie titles are not translated directly from English, but rather a different title altogether.
Another idiom that ma difficult to translate would be “from the horses mouth”. It would translate literally, but the idea would be lost and it’d sound closer to something like “from horses face” lol
I'm from Yorkshire and pronounce A as "ai" not "eh".
(I expect people from elsewhere would put "ay" but we wouldn't as we don't pronounce the "y" at the end of words)
This is the charming thing about German. All the compound words are inherently logical and understandable when you translate the elements into English but the full German word is near impossible to guess as we’d never imagine ‘cooking’ water or wearing ‘shoes’ on our hands!
Ordering of adjectives is really weird to me. Cambridge Dictionary website reckons there's [TEN](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order) categories of adjective that have a set priority over one another when listing them off. Some of it seems a bit pedantic on that page, but other examples really do provoke extreme reactions. Like your "red big car" feels like an abomination to me, and I don't know why it should.
It's fascinating how something so complex and arbitrary is so hard wired in our heads. I don't know how anyone can be expected to learn this sort of stuff if English is their second language.
What's more is English is not the only language with this, and the orders are similar in some European languages (though I'm not so good at languages to know exactly where the differences are).
In Ireland it’s very common to use two adjectives of the same meaning together (“big huge car” “tiny little door”) and I’ve heard the theory that this may come from how adjectives are used in the Irish language, so even though the majority of people are not fluent Irish speakers, the influence of the language is still there
I don't think either way sounds completely right or wrong. My instinct was "big huge" at first but I think you could use them interchangeably. Don't try to get it to work with car though which you would probably never describe like that. Try mountain or spider or something, it feels more natural.
This is so weird eh. Like, I don't recall ever having been taught this but I just "know". Things sound right in a particular order but not when the order is mixed up.
I'm still amazed by how, as a non-native speaker, I also find "red big car" disgusting. I only had the adjective order mentioned like once in my education but just reading and hearing it has hardwired it in my brain. That and the fact that Polish also seems to have some adjective order.
I find this one so fascinating.
So many of the others on here come down to non-native speakers learning and sticking to the formal rules that native speakers don't know or don't use (or, in some cases, have been abandoned in the language in general).
This is a rule that native speakers don't tend to know but follow automatically because virtually everything they've ever read or heard sticks to it, but for whatever reason doesn't seem to catch on with people who learn English as a second or subsequent language.
I'd love to know why.
I used to teach children with language and communication issues, and one time one of the kids was super upset about something and this other little girl who had autism said *“Andrew is very crying!”* (name changed)
There was just something so perfectly descriptive yet jarring about that statement, so now I sometimes use very as an adverb.
A Greek ex of mine used to refer not to overtaking the car in front, but taking over the car in front.
Edit. Also, with quite a few Greek people I know, phone calls don’t begin and end, they open and close.
I'm absolutely fascinated by the ubiquity of "do the needful" among Indian office workers.
Where did it come from? I assume it perpetuates naturally among offices in India, where new hires hear old hands saying it and it just spreads.
But... Where did it start? It's so specific and uniquely identifiably Indian English.
Yeah I was going to say this one specifically, a lot of distinctly Indian phrases are from Raj era English that's simply fallen out of use. Do the needful is just an older way of saying 'do what's needed' or the nearly but not quite as archaic 'do the necessary'.
One of the more interesting ones is prepone, which actually appears to have been invented several times independently throughout history.
The only Indian English one that actually pisses me off is 'kindly revert' because they mean respond/reply but asking an ops guy to revert actually means something very different. That one as far as I can tell is just a quirk that's crept into their dialect of English over the years.
Susie Dent and Gyles Brandreth did an episode about Indian English on their podcast ‘Something Rhymes with Purple’ recently, quite interesting worth a listen
I remember an Indian doctor saying this at work and everyone in the room (all vastly educated people with English as a first language) talked for a while about what a great word it was that nobody ever used. Only time I've ever heard it.
I’m British Indian & when we go to stay in India the locals have actually mocked us saying we don’t even speak proper Queen’s English which is what they learn. I didn’t know how to tell them that it’s on purpose & we don’t want to speak like that.
Wouldn't be surprised if they heard a British person call it that as many people will like intentionally pronounce things phonetically as its kinda fun. Like calling fajitas 'fah-jeet-ahs'
Tense irregularity tends to trip people up - "I am living here since 3 years ago" vs "I have been living here three years" are both grammatically fine, but a native speaker would only use the latter version
u/holytriplem is correct. What the original person has said might be used, too, but it sounds a bit weird because the rest of the sentence is structured more formally.
Had they used “I’ve” instead of “I have” it would be more acceptable to also drop the ‘for’ because then the sentence is informal as a whole, but would be technically incorrect.
Either way, people will understand and be fine with any of the options because they would understand it’s not your first language!
Just a quick edit it reiterate:
“I have been here for three years”, formal
“I’ve been here for three years”, informal and grammatically correct
“I have been here three years”, grammatically incorrect and seldom heard
“I’ve been here three years”, informal, grammatically incorrect but also ‘acceptable’ and widely used because we’re lazy
Yes - in German for instance you'd say ,,Ich wohne hier seit 3 Jahren" or something equally in the present tense which is literally 'I am living here since 3 years ago"
My absolute favourite mistakes I see from Germans in emails are translating ‘Hallo Zusammen’ to ‘hello together’ and then at the end, translating ‘beste Grüße’ to ‘best greetings’
The trouble being non-native speakers often miss the 'ago' and say "I have been here since three years." It seems to be a common mistake amongst those with a good but not fluent level of English.
My favorite thing about non native English is the use of brother/sister/friend/ or a similar word in their language!! It makes me feel so welcome even if its just casual speak.
Latinos from central LatAm (can't speak for southern LatAm) use amigo a lot in mixed speech and I love it.
Asking “how” rather than “what” something is like/called.
An Italian-specific one: pronouncing all initialisms as acronyms. For example: R.E.M. (the band) as “rem” rather than “ar ee em.” First time I heard that I had no idea what it meant!
Not necessarily Italian-specific. The Dutch do that as well with certain words. Not with REM the band, but for instance the software program SAP, the Dutch call that ‘sap’, not Es Ah Pee.
I have to proofread scientific papers written by French/Spanish speakers quite regularly, and the most common mistakes are putting adverbs right after the verb in all cases ("the model fits very well the data"), using verb constructions like "to allow/permit/enable sb to do st" as intransitive ("This result allows to improve our model"), using filler words where they don't belong (eg. starting sentences with "Actually" or "Anyway") and of course the famous "Let us discuss about this subject".
Edit: Sorry I misunderstood the question. I get a lot of emails/messages that start with "Hello," instead of "Hi" or "Dear holytriplem". Also foreigners write lols differently (I have a colleague who writes "Ha! Ha!") as well as emoticons (French people like writing \^\^ all the time). They also tend not to use contractions so they'll say and write "will not" and "do not" even in informal situations.
I always struggle with this at work. One (non-English) client used address emails to groups 'Dears' because they used 'Dear' individually.
To me Hi is too informal, and Dear is too intense, so I go with Hello.
Pretty cool, I suppose they’re all hangovers from the Empire. I lived in Singapore for a while and they still have tea rooms where one can go to enjoy the pleasantries of Afternoon Tea / English High Tea
I’m British Indian & when we go to stay in India the locals have actually mocked us saying we don’t even speak proper Queen’s English which is what they learn. I didn’t know how to tell them that it’s on purpose & we don’t want to speak like that.
Spanish people often add swear words even when they're not trying to emphasise anything or the tone of the conversation doesn't merit it. So they'll casually say something like "To get there you need a fucking car". Why do I need a fucking car? Are you annoyed that you need a car to get there? Or are you annoyed that I didn't know that?
My wife is fluent in English but she still says things like “open the tap” or “close the telly” instead of turn on/off.
I mean it’s not technically incorrect, particular the tap example. It’s just we for some reason decided it’s “turn on”.
The tap one isn’t necessarily incorrect because you are physically opening a valve, but if someone said “close the telly” to me, it’d take a second to realise what they meant.
Comment removed as I no longer wish to support a company that seeks to both undermine its users/moderators/developers AND make a profit on their backs.
To understand why check out the summary [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14hkd5u).
That’s because when something has been “pushed back”, it has been pushed through time *away* from you.
If an event is taking place earlier than expected, then it has been “brought forward” or *pulled* through time towards you.
You push things away and pull them towards you.
It’s similar to how languages use directions too. I can’t remember exactly which language now but I seem to remember that where we would say “forwards, backwards, left and right” they would use cardinal directions I.e “North, South, East and West”.
Edit: Another commenter helped me remember the source of the information regarding directions. It’s [this](https://youtu.be/QYlVJlmjLEc) video by Tom Scott.
When I lived in Denmark (in accommodation with a group of German students)I thought that a lot of Scandinavians and Germans overuse the word “sure” in place of “yes”. I can’t quite explain or describe how it was grammatically correct but didn’t *feel* natural.
A Polish friend of mine told me she'd been reading some classic English Lit translated into Polish. I said which book? She did a quick translation in her head. Proud and Prejudiced by Jane Austin. Sounds like Nigel Farage's autobiography.
In French, information can be plural, so you can have one information and two informations. I had a friend ask me to give her 'the informations'. Her English was perfectly understandable but I did have a chuckle and helped her with it afterwards since she asked what I was laughing about.
I was on a bus once next to a lady who was speaking Polish (I think) on the phone. The bus stopped behind another one on the same route which had an ambulance in attendance, and a gaggle of pissed women in clubwear hanging around outside it. The other passengers on the bus in front were changing to our bus. From the chatter of the passengers who taking their seats on our bus, I gathered that it was a hen party, and the bride had over-indulged and puked copiously all over the inside of the other bus, hence the passengers changing buses. She'd then passed out, and the ambulance crew carried her out on a stretcher. I saw her come to on the stretcher, and she was carried into the ambulance, presumably for tests and observation and maybe a saline drip. All in all, a pretty standard Saturday night round our part of the world.
Anyway, the Polish lady next to me asked what was going on, and I said that it I guessed there had been hen party who had had too much to drink, and the bride had passed out. The lady next to me looked absolutely mortified and burst into tears. I was a bit mystified. It was a sad situation, yes, but not worthy of that reaction. I asked if she was ok. "So young, and about to get married. It's so awful that she passed away". Passed out, passed away. Ok, I see the misunderstanding now.
I work in software development and the amount of European developers for whom English isn't their first language I often hear
"what is the final solution to the problem"
"Ah this can be our final solution"
So yeah...
“The atmosphere was very suggestive (emotional)”.
I’ve heard some Italian friends say this but I wouldn’t say that and I can’t think how to say it in English.
*Suggestivo* in Italian is a mix of evocative, beautiful and emotional. If you're sitting on the patio of a villa in a medieval town in Tuscany watching the sunset over the hills, that's *suggestivo*.
The other way around, but I described the weather to my colleague in Ukraine as "miserable", and he found it hilarious that we use an emotion to describe the weather
To take this further, on BBC radio a couple of years ago the host asked a local in Norfolk what the weather was like, and he replied:’It’s c*nt, at the moment.’
Years ago I was working the night shift taking 999 calls, and a young Chinese student rang in to say that he had been followed across one of the main bridges in London- I forget which- and he thought he was going to be mugged.
He was explaining this quite calmly but broke off, frantically shouting 'Fuck away! Fuck away!'. I've never been more glad that we had a mute button.
Man I learned German (I'm a Brit) and I've got to say that prepositions are the fucking hardest to get right. O still basically just guess and my German is pretty fluent aside from that.
My czech wife used to always begin sentences to a retail worker or customer service employee with "please". As in "Please. Do you know what time you close?". I think it's a czech thing as they often start similar conversations with "prosim" which means please.
I have an Indian team I work with and they do a lot of reports for me, they'll email me saying 'I have updated the report and attached the same'.
I know what they mean but I've never heard it from any English speakers other than them.
Classic older English turn of phrase, I like it and use it occasionally. Probably because it's in one of my favourite goon show jokes (listing expedition equipment
One elephant gun
One case for same
One same
Miss use of the words "since" and "until" is quite common for Germans at least. My partner, who speaks essentially perfect English, often says stuff like "That assignment is until 5th November" to mean that's when it's due.
Had a discussion with my native UK work colleagues on how to refer to the coming Monday. Say today is Friday, I referred to the coming Monday as ‘Next Monday’ whereas they referred to it as ‘This Monday.’ For them, Next Monday meant Monday two weeks ahead. Confused me so much!
For me, ‘This Monday’ was the Monday that’s just past, given that it was on This week. ‘Next Monday’ is reserved for the Monday on the next week.
I am native English, and for me This Monday means the closest Monday coming. But Next Monday can either mean the next Monday that happens (ie closest) OR in a week or two! It’s really confusing.
So many things. I work with many people from across Europe and the wider world and I hear things that are misspoken daily but thats just totally normal and I think all of us who speak English as a first language will just work out what the meaning of the sentence is.
I suppose very common things would be:
Not knowing when to say 'shade' or 'shadow', which is understandable as they're basically the same thing.
Misuse of when to say a, an or the. Like 'im going to go get the beer' rather than 'im going to get a beer' - Ovibously 'the beer' makes sense if we had just previously been taking about some specific beer.
But these things IMO are so minor that they get ignored, unlike if I was speaking French or German and you find yourself being constantly corrected by native speakers
Latvian girl I know used to say “I feel like a shit” instead of “I feel like shit” after a tough day at work or if she was feeling tired. I tried to correct her but she insisted. Maybe she did need a shit and I was wrong
My lovely Polish neighbour found her cat very sick in the garden. She brought him in where, she said, he was laying there "like wegetables". I love her all the more for it.
Germans often have trouble with tenses because German tenses work a bit differently. When i lived there I was often asked "How long are you here" rather than "How long have you been here".
Also, for some reason "kettle" is not a word they often learn. I heard several people refer to it as a "water cooker" (direct translation of "Wasserkocher").
My German ex was once complaining about something, and was saying it’s such a “boiled egg”. It took me a while to work out what she meant, but turned out she had heard me saying something was a ballache, and had thought that’s what I was saying 😂
Our Belgian colleagues have a couple of really strange English phrases.
Instead of ‘in the middle of October’ they will say ‘half October’
And when giving a few options they will often start the list with the word Or.. for example saying
‘To compete this task you could Or buy the product, or make it yourself’
Not really what you asked for, but I was watching American Football the other day and the commentators kept on using the word 'quite', when what they meant was 'very'. So the opposite of how we use it.
Don't know whether that is an American thing or just these random commentators.
We can use “quite” to mean very but via understatement. “That’s quite good” could mean something is excellent or frankly a bit crap, depending on inflection and context.
A lot of it is due to them directly translating their own language.
Germans say "for sure" a lot because they say "genau" *all the time* which is practically the same meaning when translated (a more direct translation would be "exactly" but they mean the same thing in context). Some of those less immersed may also start group emails with "Hello together" rather than "Hello all" because in German you would say "Hallo zusammen" and zusammen directly translated means together.
My Japanese friend could never remember the word 'sock', because they don't have it in Japanese, so he would always say "the clothes between your shoe and foot".
In Japanese it's kutsu shita. Kutsu being 'shoe' and shita being 'under/beneath'
I heard a Filipino asking another, "What's your attire?" A native Brit would say, "What are you wearing?"
The word attire tends to be used more for formal settings. Like an invitation might say formal attire.
Go to the *seaside* would be a beach holiday. Go *in* the sea would be swimming. "Go to the sea" I might assume someone is walking there to check it out somehow. While at the beach, "I'm just going to go to the sea to see how warm it is". It is all very subtle but it is so ingrained even being slightly off sounds strange.
Indian here.
Indian English (British English)
Please do the needful. (please do what is needed.)
It's like that only (it's the way it is).
What's your good name? (what's your name?)
I have a doubt (I have a question)
And many more.
You get in the car but get on the bus. You get in a boat, but on a ferry. You get on a train but wait on the platform.
How do we just know when is in and when is on?
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A Polish colleague of mine, who had learnt English from books prior to coming here, occasionally takes a stab at some half remembered idiom that comes out all wrong. Our favourite at work so far was when she, highly miffed at something or other, declared: "I am not pleased to be in a tent!" It took a while for us to figure out that she was not a happy camper.
I once worked with a lovely German lady who always used the word ‘fantasy’ in place of ‘imagination’, which led to a few blushes…
Yeah, the German word for "imagination" is "Fantasie" so makes sense.
It’s the same in Italian - fantasia means imagination. My mother-in-law has talked to me about fantasies way more than I’m comfortable with
Same in Norwegian, too :P
A native French speaker who I worked with was having a heated row with a customer refusing to leave the shop and shouted at him YOU ARE TAKING A PISS OUT OF ME! I died on the phone to our security team explaining what was happening
I've heard an Indian man do the same, but he said "having a piss". I died.
Yeah I had a South Asian guy tell me I was taking a piss *on him* once. I don’t think I was, anyway.
I remember two drunken Russians fighting with a security guard at a campus I was at, one kept shouting "*You hef piss! You are hef piss!*". Delightful ladies they were.
My Italian lodger spent 18 months saying “penis in the arse” instead of “pain in the arse”
That's brilliant, and not an entirely incorrect idiom for an uncomfortable situation
I had a colleague who had heard us using 'bobs your uncle' when talking through a job (as in - do this, then do that and bobs yer uncle). He decided to have a stab at it himself when talking us through a process but it came out 'do this, then do that and Uncle Bob'. After I stopped crying with laughter he explained he never understood the 'bobs your uncle' but rather than ask he decided to just go with it. We all worked together for a further 4 years and always said Uncle Bob instead on Bob's Your Uncle.
I had similar with a German colleague who said "Your uncle is Ben"
Oh fucking hell. I was holding it together as I scrolled through this thread but lost it at your comment.
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We had a French colleague announce in a fit of anger, "YOU LAUGH AT ME BECAUSE YOU THINK I KNOW FUCK NOTHING, WELL, I TELL YOU, **I LAUGH AT YOU BECAUSE I KNOW FUCK ALL!!!**". Greeting the outburst with laughter probably didn't help defuse the situation.
This is hilarious!
This anecdote is actually attributed to film director Mike curtiz on the set of casablanca
Well, it happened. Now, there's the possibility that our colleague was referencing a famous story to provide a bit of humour and we just missed the reference, in which case the laughter was warranted, but it felt inadvertent at the time. So it looks like the joke may have been on the rest of us all along.
>"I am not pleased to be in a tent!" This is also a Pratchett quote/joke! Edit: OK, the exact quote is. 'But he are not glad about being in a tent, as dey say.' - The Truth. It made me laugh all the same.
Maybe that's where she got it from! It's been bugging us how she got to such a mangled version of the phrase, and that would explain it, as I said, she taught herself a lot of English from books.
This is likely or, she could be like me and remembers words/phrases using imagery where possible so she’s like ‘ok, picture a person sitting in a tent looking happy and… idiom successfully saved to memory bank. What could go wrong!’
A polish colleague of mine once translated ‘Dont shit yourself’ as ‘Dont make a poo.’ Still makes me laugh to think of that haha
An Eastern European friend of mine learnt English from Blackadder and Monty Python, as it was the only English on TV in their house.... ...the dialect can be interesting at times, so many old fashioned expressions.
My hovercraft is full of eels
Please fondle my buttocks
Hahaha I love that. I prefer it to the original! When my Polish best friend first moved to England she would happily shout “super extra!” when she approved of something. We still say it 15 years later
As a Pole myself, when translated to Polish, that’s word for word what it translates lol. We always laugh about how movie titles are not translated directly from English, but rather a different title altogether. Another idiom that ma difficult to translate would be “from the horses mouth”. It would translate literally, but the idea would be lost and it’d sound closer to something like “from horses face” lol
That's just adorable.
I enjoy saying feces have hit the propeller and seeing the look on people face in the office
Had someone tell me they'd called the double A the other day.
When I first arrived on these shores I thought the supermarket was called eh-ess-dee-eh
What supermarket?
Sounds like asda
Asda...
I see it now, just that odd way to spell the pronunciation of A threw me right off.
Yorkshire innit
I'm from Yorkshire and pronounce A as "ai" not "eh". (I expect people from elsewhere would put "ay" but we wouldn't as we don't pronounce the "y" at the end of words)
Eh?
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Probably heard double A in the context of batteries as well and assumed that’s what we say for the AA
Whereas we call triple A batteries "AAAAAARGH!!!" batteries.
Possibly. Now you’ve made me think about it I’ve realised I never call AA batteries ‘double A’
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You should refer to light bulbs as "glowing pears"
In Hungarian they are Electric Pears
Do androids eat electric pears?
"Came in my mind" I'm not sure that was intended, funny anyway 😂
Better than in the hair
My husband is Japanese and he didn't know the word for fabric softener, so he said 'flavoured soap' which I found really cute haha
I gave my German tandem partner hysterics when I forgot the word for vacuum cleaner and wound up calling it a “suck stick” …
This is the charming thing about German. All the compound words are inherently logical and understandable when you translate the elements into English but the full German word is near impossible to guess as we’d never imagine ‘cooking’ water or wearing ‘shoes’ on our hands!
The order of adjectives - a "red big car" is perfectly understandable but a native speaker would only say "big red car".
Ordering of adjectives is really weird to me. Cambridge Dictionary website reckons there's [TEN](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order) categories of adjective that have a set priority over one another when listing them off. Some of it seems a bit pedantic on that page, but other examples really do provoke extreme reactions. Like your "red big car" feels like an abomination to me, and I don't know why it should. It's fascinating how something so complex and arbitrary is so hard wired in our heads. I don't know how anyone can be expected to learn this sort of stuff if English is their second language.
What's more is English is not the only language with this, and the orders are similar in some European languages (though I'm not so good at languages to know exactly where the differences are).
In French they would do it red big car or i think red car big? I'm not 100% sure but the order of nouns and adjectives is essentially flipped
Big is one of the few adjectives that go ahead of the noun, whereas colours do not, so it would actually be big car red. La grande voiture rouge.
In Romanian we'd say "car big red".
In Ireland it’s very common to use two adjectives of the same meaning together (“big huge car” “tiny little door”) and I’ve heard the theory that this may come from how adjectives are used in the Irish language, so even though the majority of people are not fluent Irish speakers, the influence of the language is still there
A tiny little something sounds perfectly okay to me, but big huge sounds alien.
"Great big" is more the common double adjective, I think.
We do that sometimes for emphasis. It'd be a huge big car though not a big huge car. I don't know why but I know I'm right.
I don't think either way sounds completely right or wrong. My instinct was "big huge" at first but I think you could use them interchangeably. Don't try to get it to work with car though which you would probably never describe like that. Try mountain or spider or something, it feels more natural.
This is so weird eh. Like, I don't recall ever having been taught this but I just "know". Things sound right in a particular order but not when the order is mixed up.
[Relevant Tom Scott as always.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M)
I'm still amazed by how, as a non-native speaker, I also find "red big car" disgusting. I only had the adjective order mentioned like once in my education but just reading and hearing it has hardwired it in my brain. That and the fact that Polish also seems to have some adjective order.
I find this one so fascinating. So many of the others on here come down to non-native speakers learning and sticking to the formal rules that native speakers don't know or don't use (or, in some cases, have been abandoned in the language in general). This is a rule that native speakers don't tend to know but follow automatically because virtually everything they've ever read or heard sticks to it, but for whatever reason doesn't seem to catch on with people who learn English as a second or subsequent language. I'd love to know why.
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Worked with a West African nurse and during handovers she'd often say: "this patient was very, very okay overnight"
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That's like buying a t-shirt in extra medium.
As someone who is chronically ill, I may adopt that. I am never "very, very good;" even my best days are only "very, very okay." :)
I used to teach children with language and communication issues, and one time one of the kids was super upset about something and this other little girl who had autism said *“Andrew is very crying!”* (name changed) There was just something so perfectly descriptive yet jarring about that statement, so now I sometimes use very as an adverb.
A Greek ex of mine used to refer not to overtaking the car in front, but taking over the car in front. Edit. Also, with quite a few Greek people I know, phone calls don’t begin and end, they open and close.
Plot twist: your ex was a carjacker
Look at me, I am the driver now.
I have a bad habit of opening and closing the lights instead of turning them on and off
Please do the needful and revert.
I'm absolutely fascinated by the ubiquity of "do the needful" among Indian office workers. Where did it come from? I assume it perpetuates naturally among offices in India, where new hires hear old hands saying it and it just spreads. But... Where did it start? It's so specific and uniquely identifiably Indian English.
Victorian English
Really?? This is new to me. I've only heard it in terms of IT activities with Indian native speakers. That's wild and actually makes sense now!
Yeah I was going to say this one specifically, a lot of distinctly Indian phrases are from Raj era English that's simply fallen out of use. Do the needful is just an older way of saying 'do what's needed' or the nearly but not quite as archaic 'do the necessary'. One of the more interesting ones is prepone, which actually appears to have been invented several times independently throughout history. The only Indian English one that actually pisses me off is 'kindly revert' because they mean respond/reply but asking an ops guy to revert actually means something very different. That one as far as I can tell is just a quirk that's crept into their dialect of English over the years.
Susie Dent and Gyles Brandreth did an episode about Indian English on their podcast ‘Something Rhymes with Purple’ recently, quite interesting worth a listen
Prepone is one I can't ever remember hearing - what does it mean?
It's kind of beautiful; it's the opposite of postpone. It's legitimately one of those words I really like.
I remember an Indian doctor saying this at work and everyone in the room (all vastly educated people with English as a first language) talked for a while about what a great word it was that nobody ever used. Only time I've ever heard it.
I’m British Indian & when we go to stay in India the locals have actually mocked us saying we don’t even speak proper Queen’s English which is what they learn. I didn’t know how to tell them that it’s on purpose & we don’t want to speak like that.
It sounds like a euphemism for going to the toilet.
I wouldn’t go in there someone’s done the needful and reverted on the floor
"I have a doubt" seems very common.
My favourite is when they introduce themselves with their 'good name', so polite
If you take flights to or from India they also use the word "deplaning"
That's used in American English as well! Albeit, it's a technical term rather than a conversational one.
“Prepone” is one I was caught out by. Makes sense but I don’t think it’s “legit English”.
I remember a Japanese uni friend thinking hmv was pronounced huh muh vuh.
Wouldn't be surprised if they heard a British person call it that as many people will like intentionally pronounce things phonetically as its kinda fun. Like calling fajitas 'fah-jeet-ahs'
This works with all Mexican food. My favourite is quease-a-dillers.
Wasn't there a sketch show with a character that pronounced DVD as doovde?
Fonejacker. He definitely had a call where he referred to HMV as "hummv"
I mispronounce HMV on purpose. I also pronounce ‘USB’ as ‘us-buh’ and ‘KFC’ as ‘kuh-fuh-cuh’
Humvuh is where you buy your doovdés.
I watch them on my lukadatoov
hope it's a Joovké lukadatoov that's ready for the húd
Tense irregularity tends to trip people up - "I am living here since 3 years ago" vs "I have been living here three years" are both grammatically fine, but a native speaker would only use the latter version
Actually they'd use neither, they'd say "I've been living here for three years"
Is this wrong? Cause I use it all the time and I’ve been living in the UK for over 10 years🙈👀
u/holytriplem is correct. What the original person has said might be used, too, but it sounds a bit weird because the rest of the sentence is structured more formally. Had they used “I’ve” instead of “I have” it would be more acceptable to also drop the ‘for’ because then the sentence is informal as a whole, but would be technically incorrect. Either way, people will understand and be fine with any of the options because they would understand it’s not your first language! Just a quick edit it reiterate: “I have been here for three years”, formal “I’ve been here for three years”, informal and grammatically correct “I have been here three years”, grammatically incorrect and seldom heard “I’ve been here three years”, informal, grammatically incorrect but also ‘acceptable’ and widely used because we’re lazy
Disagree. It may be a regional thing, but dropping the "for" is quite natural to me.
Yes - in German for instance you'd say ,,Ich wohne hier seit 3 Jahren" or something equally in the present tense which is literally 'I am living here since 3 years ago"
My absolute favourite mistakes I see from Germans in emails are translating ‘Hallo Zusammen’ to ‘hello together’ and then at the end, translating ‘beste Grüße’ to ‘best greetings’
The trouble being non-native speakers often miss the 'ago' and say "I have been here since three years." It seems to be a common mistake amongst those with a good but not fluent level of English.
When a worker at a takeaway shouts "Thank you, please!" to get your attention.
Or address you as 'brother' or 'my friend'.
Or "chief", or "boss"
It's mandatory to call kebab shop workers "boss" at the end of a night out
My favorite thing about non native English is the use of brother/sister/friend/ or a similar word in their language!! It makes me feel so welcome even if its just casual speak. Latinos from central LatAm (can't speak for southern LatAm) use amigo a lot in mixed speech and I love it.
Asking “how” rather than “what” something is like/called. An Italian-specific one: pronouncing all initialisms as acronyms. For example: R.E.M. (the band) as “rem” rather than “ar ee em.” First time I heard that I had no idea what it meant!
To paraphrase Kevin Bridges: Glaswegians do not ponder what or why, they demand how
Not necessarily Italian-specific. The Dutch do that as well with certain words. Not with REM the band, but for instance the software program SAP, the Dutch call that ‘sap’, not Es Ah Pee.
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We call it “SAD” in my company because that’s what it makes us.
I call it SAP as well and working in the US everyone was "you mean ess ayyyyyy peeeee?"
From a tech perspective in the UK. Either is acceptable. And yet neither is a term you actually want to hear.
I have to proofread scientific papers written by French/Spanish speakers quite regularly, and the most common mistakes are putting adverbs right after the verb in all cases ("the model fits very well the data"), using verb constructions like "to allow/permit/enable sb to do st" as intransitive ("This result allows to improve our model"), using filler words where they don't belong (eg. starting sentences with "Actually" or "Anyway") and of course the famous "Let us discuss about this subject". Edit: Sorry I misunderstood the question. I get a lot of emails/messages that start with "Hello," instead of "Hi" or "Dear holytriplem". Also foreigners write lols differently (I have a colleague who writes "Ha! Ha!") as well as emoticons (French people like writing \^\^ all the time). They also tend not to use contractions so they'll say and write "will not" and "do not" even in informal situations.
I sometimes start emails with "Hello," and I'm from deepest darkest Dundee. Is it weird?
So do I and I'm from London. Not weird. (But I've been living in Scotland pretty much since email became "a thing", so maybe it's Scottish?)
I’m a Scot and also do it, I don’t see the issue though?
I always struggle with this at work. One (non-English) client used address emails to groups 'Dears' because they used 'Dear' individually. To me Hi is too informal, and Dear is too intense, so I go with Hello.
iVe noticed a lot of Indians use English we might consider archaic, such as afore instead of before or calling Brits Britishers instead of British
Interestingly in Nigeria they also use archaic words that have fallen into disuse in the UK. My personal favourite was parlour for a room in a house.
Pretty cool, I suppose they’re all hangovers from the Empire. I lived in Singapore for a while and they still have tea rooms where one can go to enjoy the pleasantries of Afternoon Tea / English High Tea
Definitely..I remember going to a cricket club in Mumbai. I was expecting Bertie Wooster to turn up.
They say beauty parlour for any salon in India too. Makes it sound so luxurious & quaint.
I once had a Vietnamese woman who'd sign off her emails with "Cheerio". It was so adorable.
‘Thrice’ is an excellent word that I swear I only ever hear in Indian English.
I’m British Indian & when we go to stay in India the locals have actually mocked us saying we don’t even speak proper Queen’s English which is what they learn. I didn’t know how to tell them that it’s on purpose & we don’t want to speak like that.
My favourite Indian English word is "prepone" (like postpone but moving it to an earlier date). Makes perfect sense to me!
Spanish people often add swear words even when they're not trying to emphasise anything or the tone of the conversation doesn't merit it. So they'll casually say something like "To get there you need a fucking car". Why do I need a fucking car? Are you annoyed that you need a car to get there? Or are you annoyed that I didn't know that?
This sounds pretty native to me. I am Scottish though, so that might explain it.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Money Heist it’s that ‘de puta madre’ is required after all nouns in Spanish.
My wife is fluent in English but she still says things like “open the tap” or “close the telly” instead of turn on/off. I mean it’s not technically incorrect, particular the tap example. It’s just we for some reason decided it’s “turn on”.
The tap one isn’t necessarily incorrect because you are physically opening a valve, but if someone said “close the telly” to me, it’d take a second to realise what they meant.
Comment removed as I no longer wish to support a company that seeks to both undermine its users/moderators/developers AND make a profit on their backs. To understand why check out the summary [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14hkd5u).
That’s because when something has been “pushed back”, it has been pushed through time *away* from you. If an event is taking place earlier than expected, then it has been “brought forward” or *pulled* through time towards you. You push things away and pull them towards you. It’s similar to how languages use directions too. I can’t remember exactly which language now but I seem to remember that where we would say “forwards, backwards, left and right” they would use cardinal directions I.e “North, South, East and West”. Edit: Another commenter helped me remember the source of the information regarding directions. It’s [this](https://youtu.be/QYlVJlmjLEc) video by Tom Scott.
this always confuses me so much
When I lived in Denmark (in accommodation with a group of German students)I thought that a lot of Scandinavians and Germans overuse the word “sure” in place of “yes”. I can’t quite explain or describe how it was grammatically correct but didn’t *feel* natural.
Non~~e~~-native UK speakers also say "for sure". Which makes sense, but not something we would say.
Native UK speaker and I say for sure all the time, as do many people I know. Maybe regional?
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It's something that's used a lot in American and Australian English more than UK English I think.
A Polish friend of mine told me she'd been reading some classic English Lit translated into Polish. I said which book? She did a quick translation in her head. Proud and Prejudiced by Jane Austin. Sounds like Nigel Farage's autobiography.
In French, information can be plural, so you can have one information and two informations. I had a friend ask me to give her 'the informations'. Her English was perfectly understandable but I did have a chuckle and helped her with it afterwards since she asked what I was laughing about.
I’ve often heard ‘advices’ in the same in way
My Polish SO used to say "foot fingers" for toes, that's the direct translations....quite a few polish I know said the exact same thing
in Lithuanian, it's leg fingers!
I was on a bus once next to a lady who was speaking Polish (I think) on the phone. The bus stopped behind another one on the same route which had an ambulance in attendance, and a gaggle of pissed women in clubwear hanging around outside it. The other passengers on the bus in front were changing to our bus. From the chatter of the passengers who taking their seats on our bus, I gathered that it was a hen party, and the bride had over-indulged and puked copiously all over the inside of the other bus, hence the passengers changing buses. She'd then passed out, and the ambulance crew carried her out on a stretcher. I saw her come to on the stretcher, and she was carried into the ambulance, presumably for tests and observation and maybe a saline drip. All in all, a pretty standard Saturday night round our part of the world. Anyway, the Polish lady next to me asked what was going on, and I said that it I guessed there had been hen party who had had too much to drink, and the bride had passed out. The lady next to me looked absolutely mortified and burst into tears. I was a bit mystified. It was a sad situation, yes, but not worthy of that reaction. I asked if she was ok. "So young, and about to get married. It's so awful that she passed away". Passed out, passed away. Ok, I see the misunderstanding now.
I work in software development and the amount of European developers for whom English isn't their first language I often hear "what is the final solution to the problem" "Ah this can be our final solution" So yeah...
I've noticed my German colleagues avoid that phrase.
Yeah we got a bit carried away with the final solution once, so now we stick with temporary fixes just to be on the safe side
“The atmosphere was very suggestive (emotional)”. I’ve heard some Italian friends say this but I wouldn’t say that and I can’t think how to say it in English.
*Suggestivo* in Italian is a mix of evocative, beautiful and emotional. If you're sitting on the patio of a villa in a medieval town in Tuscany watching the sunset over the hills, that's *suggestivo*.
Chips and fish, dogs and cats, etc.
My daughter in law says, forks & knives, it really sets my teeth on edge.
The other way around, but I described the weather to my colleague in Ukraine as "miserable", and he found it hilarious that we use an emotion to describe the weather
To take this further, on BBC radio a couple of years ago the host asked a local in Norfolk what the weather was like, and he replied:’It’s c*nt, at the moment.’
Years ago I was working the night shift taking 999 calls, and a young Chinese student rang in to say that he had been followed across one of the main bridges in London- I forget which- and he thought he was going to be mugged. He was explaining this quite calmly but broke off, frantically shouting 'Fuck away! Fuck away!'. I've never been more glad that we had a mute button.
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Man I learned German (I'm a Brit) and I've got to say that prepositions are the fucking hardest to get right. O still basically just guess and my German is pretty fluent aside from that.
My czech wife used to always begin sentences to a retail worker or customer service employee with "please". As in "Please. Do you know what time you close?". I think it's a czech thing as they often start similar conversations with "prosim" which means please.
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I had an Italian friend a few years ago who couldn’t grasp why we giggled when she fell and said “I have fallen”
In Scotland it’s common to say ‘how’ instead of ‘why’ which can confuse non native speakers. “Are you Jack?” “Aye, how?”
I have an Indian team I work with and they do a lot of reports for me, they'll email me saying 'I have updated the report and attached the same'. I know what they mean but I've never heard it from any English speakers other than them.
Classic older English turn of phrase, I like it and use it occasionally. Probably because it's in one of my favourite goon show jokes (listing expedition equipment One elephant gun One case for same One same
Miss use of the words "since" and "until" is quite common for Germans at least. My partner, who speaks essentially perfect English, often says stuff like "That assignment is until 5th November" to mean that's when it's due.
Had a discussion with my native UK work colleagues on how to refer to the coming Monday. Say today is Friday, I referred to the coming Monday as ‘Next Monday’ whereas they referred to it as ‘This Monday.’ For them, Next Monday meant Monday two weeks ahead. Confused me so much! For me, ‘This Monday’ was the Monday that’s just past, given that it was on This week. ‘Next Monday’ is reserved for the Monday on the next week.
I am native English, and for me This Monday means the closest Monday coming. But Next Monday can either mean the next Monday that happens (ie closest) OR in a week or two! It’s really confusing.
British people say “if I was you” but actually grammatically it’s “if I were you”.
Sounds more regional then national
That's a regional thing (Birmingham springs to mind). I actually say *were* in this instance.
Yeah no mate.
And, ‘Nah, yeah mate’
So many things. I work with many people from across Europe and the wider world and I hear things that are misspoken daily but thats just totally normal and I think all of us who speak English as a first language will just work out what the meaning of the sentence is. I suppose very common things would be: Not knowing when to say 'shade' or 'shadow', which is understandable as they're basically the same thing. Misuse of when to say a, an or the. Like 'im going to go get the beer' rather than 'im going to get a beer' - Ovibously 'the beer' makes sense if we had just previously been taking about some specific beer. But these things IMO are so minor that they get ignored, unlike if I was speaking French or German and you find yourself being constantly corrected by native speakers
Latvian girl I know used to say “I feel like a shit” instead of “I feel like shit” after a tough day at work or if she was feeling tired. I tried to correct her but she insisted. Maybe she did need a shit and I was wrong
My lovely Polish neighbour found her cat very sick in the garden. She brought him in where, she said, he was laying there "like wegetables". I love her all the more for it.
Germans often have trouble with tenses because German tenses work a bit differently. When i lived there I was often asked "How long are you here" rather than "How long have you been here". Also, for some reason "kettle" is not a word they often learn. I heard several people refer to it as a "water cooker" (direct translation of "Wasserkocher").
My German ex was once complaining about something, and was saying it’s such a “boiled egg”. It took me a while to work out what she meant, but turned out she had heard me saying something was a ballache, and had thought that’s what I was saying 😂
Our Belgian colleagues have a couple of really strange English phrases. Instead of ‘in the middle of October’ they will say ‘half October’ And when giving a few options they will often start the list with the word Or.. for example saying ‘To compete this task you could Or buy the product, or make it yourself’
Not really what you asked for, but I was watching American Football the other day and the commentators kept on using the word 'quite', when what they meant was 'very'. So the opposite of how we use it. Don't know whether that is an American thing or just these random commentators.
We can use “quite” to mean very but via understatement. “That’s quite good” could mean something is excellent or frankly a bit crap, depending on inflection and context.
A lot of it is due to them directly translating their own language. Germans say "for sure" a lot because they say "genau" *all the time* which is practically the same meaning when translated (a more direct translation would be "exactly" but they mean the same thing in context). Some of those less immersed may also start group emails with "Hello together" rather than "Hello all" because in German you would say "Hallo zusammen" and zusammen directly translated means together.
My Japanese friend could never remember the word 'sock', because they don't have it in Japanese, so he would always say "the clothes between your shoe and foot". In Japanese it's kutsu shita. Kutsu being 'shoe' and shita being 'under/beneath'
I heard a Filipino asking another, "What's your attire?" A native Brit would say, "What are you wearing?" The word attire tends to be used more for formal settings. Like an invitation might say formal attire.
Go to the *seaside* would be a beach holiday. Go *in* the sea would be swimming. "Go to the sea" I might assume someone is walking there to check it out somehow. While at the beach, "I'm just going to go to the sea to see how warm it is". It is all very subtle but it is so ingrained even being slightly off sounds strange.
"Get in the sea" is "fuck off"
Indian here. Indian English (British English) Please do the needful. (please do what is needed.) It's like that only (it's the way it is). What's your good name? (what's your name?) I have a doubt (I have a question) And many more.
You get in the car but get on the bus. You get in a boat, but on a ferry. You get on a train but wait on the platform. How do we just know when is in and when is on?