BootsnAll Travel Community

I don't know where I picked up this habit, but I have a tendency to add prepositions in places where there's no need for one. I'm not talking here about using the wrong preposition, I'm talking about adding them where none should be. It confuses people and makes me sound like a hillbilly Italian speaker, and it gives me very little solace to hear my tutor say, "When you master the prepositions, you'll have mastered the language."

So please tell me about the stupid language mistakes you make repeatedly, no matter how many times you've learned otherwise.

I have the Cyrillic alphabet firmly planted in my brain now.

Yesterday I was posting a comment on a blog and it had one of those verification steps where you have to type out the wavy word. I think the word was something like "plant" and I kept getting errors because I was typing "rlant." In Cyrillic this letter -- р -- sounds like the English "r" sound.

There are several like that and I do it all the time.

I think it's actually a good sign when you at least realize that, or you make a certain kind of mistake.

Now I sometimes make mistakes with things like adjective agreement with masc/fem/neutral nouns, which is probably one of the easiest things about this language! Not that I get the harder things right either, though.

Once in a while a French work sticks in my memory and it makes me confuse the Bosnian word...trouver in French is find but traziti in Bosnian is look for, but I say trazim when I mean the opposite (find). Aside from this though, I've pretty much lost my ability to say anything at all in French.

yeah, i tend to make the same type mistakes over and over again, until i really force my self to be cognizant of it... and even then can still make the mistake. I really beat myself up over repeating mistakes, but ill sometimes just blame it on the drugs that ive taken

We're learning Thai at the minute and I appear to have a a one tone voice.

Which is far from ideal. In Thai you can change the meaning of a word by adding one of five different tones.

I thought learning Welsh was bad enough but this is really hard.

I think a lot of the time Thais get what I'm trying to say by the context, I just worry that I'm being insulting.

At the moment it's not too bad because everyone we come across here speaks English, but when we head off into the mountains in a few weeks to do some teaching, I don't think it will be so easy.

I have a bad habit of phrasing things in Arabic as if they were English words. Or ranting in the language as if I were ranting in English so where I put describing words tends to get a bit haphazard. And when that happens I always forget the difference between Laysit and Machi (which is a negation but laysit is used for living creatures).
Oh and I also am prone to calling men kadeba (liar). Problem is kadeba is 'liar' for a girl. Kadeb is liar for a guy.
Shame on me.

It's been a few years since I've studied Swedish in earnest (I was an exchange student in Sweden 04-05), but I'm getting back into it recently in preparation for possibly visiting my host sister in February and being a counselor at a Swedish-language camp in Minnesota this summer. The definite forms of "ett" words really trip me up.

There are two "genders" of nouns, except instead of feminine and masculine, they're common gender (where the article is en) and neuter (where the article is ett). For neuter nouns, there are two main ways to do the plural and plural definite forms:

A train: ett tåg
Trains: tåg
The trains: tågen

BUT

An apple: ett äpple
Apples: äpplen
The apples: äpplena

Messes me up every time. I can never remember which category ett-nouns belong in.

Arre,
your skills in Swedish seem to be pretty good anyway.
To complicate things even more I could add to your examples:
De här tågen, but dessa tåg
De här äpplena, but dessa äpplen.
"De här" and "dessa" have practically the same meaning, but the rules for using the definite form are not consequent in this case.
I'm not a native speaker, so I know the problem well.

Too often I say in Portugal "gracias" instead of "obrigado". I keep making that mistake even if I know that some Portugese get annoyed with Spanish intrusions in their language

Speaking German totally messes up my English sentence structure. And of course I address English speakers in German and vice versa.

Prisa, I managed to say 'marhaba' instead of 'maaasalaam' once. Thankfully, I don't have too many opportunities to mess up Arabic phrases

And since both my pronunciation and accent are hopeless after more than twenty years of speaking English, I think I'll stay well clear of tonal languages...