• grober_Unfug@discuss.tchncs.de
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    9 days ago

    I’m really confused, so please help me understand this. I’m not a native English speaker and to me it’s fairly easy, if you can’t replace it with “who is” or “who has” then it must be “whose”. So why is it so hard for a lot of native speakers to distinguish between the two?

    • Agrivar@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Shit education combined with willful laziness. The same twats can’t manage there/their/they’re and think it’s “could of” rather than “could have.” I lost hope in the American experiment decades ago.

    • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      8 days ago

      When you learn to speak a language before you learn to write, homophones can be rough.

      Plus, we usually use apostrophes to indicate possession, so the possessive “whose” can be confusing. See also: it’s/its.

    • zjti8eit@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      8 days ago

      because we learn English as babies by hearing things, and they sound the same. We also struggle with to, too, and two; there, their and they’re, its and it’s, etc.

    • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
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      8 days ago

      Native english speaker here, that has always baffled me. I learned in like first grade that you can mash two words together and all you need is an apostrophe. If it has an apostrophe (and isnt possesive) then its two words. I can definitely understand confusion about there/their and stuff like that, but not knowing “it’s” and similar conjunctions is wild to me.

      Obv for a non native speaker i genuinely dont care how you speak, as long as i have an idea of what youre trying to say. I dont care for natives either, but it does make me curious how they got through school without paying attention. Although if you live in the US currently, im sure youre aware that wondering how people got through school is a daily occurance.

    • X@piefed.world
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      8 days ago

      Learned, willful ignorance, and a shit education system. Mostly.