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?
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’m not native English. It’s imperfect English or writing in other language that not many would fully understand.
Non natives can usually spell better than natives.
I know for me, I’m having more difficulty because of failing eyesight. If you can’t see the word you can’t perceive you’ve spelled it incorrectly.
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.
I’ve on the Internet for the same amount of time and it’s gotten MUCH worse.
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.
American here:
About 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, 2nd grade or worse reading and writing skills.
The average literacy level of Americans is between 5th and 6th grade… meaning the next 30% have the reading/writing skills of someone who basically only conpleted elementary school.
These are numbers for adults 18 and up, by the way, not kids.
Almost every single person I’ve met who learned English as a second language… can speak it more fluently than most native English speakers I’ve known who grew up in America. More extensive vocabularies, better grammar, better spelling.
And this will get worse.
Covid resulted in a year to two years of remote or missed classes for Gen Alpha, and the Repulicans look poised to finally kill off the public education system in all but the wealthier, solid blue states. Department of Education will be disbanded by the end of the year or earlier if nobody stops it.
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
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.
I’ve always experienced the opposite - native English speakers are horrible at spelling because they don’t have to put any effort into comprehending the language, vs non-native speakers who frequently have to take ESL tests for either academia, work, or immigration, and therefore had more exposure to spelling practice.
That would depend on how long they’ve been studying the language for, and their goals/needs in language learning. Someone who needed to learn English and pass formal tests for the sake of employment or immigration will eventually reach that level, but someone who either hasn’t been studying that long or doesn’t consider it a critical priority because they’re just browsing English websites and media for fun might not.
Bruh slept through 13 years of English lessons 😂
Lessons are forgotten fast. Ask an adult to do 3 digit multiplication and watch them fumble. Ask about geometry and they’ll ask Google for a calculator. I don’t remember how to do projectile physics. All the same for English. If all a person does is speak the language while writing very simple messages (in comparison to English essays), the memory of complex synthesis is lost fast. If they’re not continuing to do those tasks in life, it’s gone.
I agree. My experience doesn’t really align with the idea that ESL learners are better spellers. English is a conventional language, so it’s not like there is a dictated spelling. Spelling is just a convention.
My guess is it’s just the frequency illusion, because they’re also super common among Americans who have only ever spoken English from birth. My theory is that these types of misspellings (like ‘itsplain’ instead of ‘explain’) are from folks who don’t read a lot and therefore seem to be guessing on spelling based on what they’ve (mis)heard rather than having seen it on the page/screen enough to notice the correct spelling.
No they haven’t changed at all. I’ve been using mostly Lemmy as my one and only SM for most of the past year and this is a very new phenomenon to me. I’m also not a native English speaker at all, my mother tongue doesn’t even share the Latin alphabet
Well I guess I don’t know the timing but I wouldn’t be surprised it Lemmy was it - there are a bunch of non-native English speakers here
Are you fucking dense? I just told you that I’m also ESL, I don’t make such typos, it’s no excuse at all and makes it make not an iota more sense than saying the pigs are flying hence people’s spelling fell off a fucking cliff.
Lemmy is def not it, I moved here a year or more ago, the spelling has gotten very bad very recently and I only use this platform pretty much and this is where I’ve seen it the most by far.
Idk I swear to god it wasn’t this bad like 6 months ago, nevermind 10 years ago. Again, I’m not talking about formality or punctuation, but basic grammar like spelling which as you said should be taken care of by autocorrect and I did notice an improvement sometimes around the mid-2010s, but very recently there’s been a noticeable decline, at least in my opinion.
What possible cause could there be for lots of people to suddenly start spelling worse? Wait, this isn’t another of those ‘smart phones are making us dumb!’ posts is it? Cause people have said that about pretty much every invention since the printing press. It’s probably just the frequency illusion, where you notice something for no particular reason and then start seeing it everywhere, especially if you’re only noticing changes over the period of a few months. Spelling was every bit as bad in 1995 as it is in 2025. Maybe worse due to the lack of access to spell-checking, auto-correct, online dictionaries, etc, and you can notice it especially in people who don’t read much (which is how you get spellings like ‘itsplain’ instead of ‘explain’, it seems like they’re guessing based on what they’ve (mis)heard instead of seeing it on the page/screen) even long before smart phones were a thing.
No I’m not implying any conclusion with my post. Smartphones actually massively improved grammar on the internet through the joys of autocorrect in my experience
Ah, fair enough. My bad for assuming.
Not saying it is, but accidental, quality degrading, changes to a major/prevalent auto-correct system could result in what OP is claiming. Just to give an example.
I don’t think most people realize how much they rely on auto correct when they are on a phone. When I switched to a new keyboard because I like local hosting my voice recognition the auto correct was initially way worse and my typing speed went down by maybe half.
No, I think you does have point, I’ve been sawing that, too.
Look at Mr fancy pants here using punctuation like yer some kinda edumacated person of learneding
I scenes it to scenes it many time. OP is rite is got extream. Happnd all the sudden to
Youse*
Et oak thoug we awl mess that juan.
U be baader-meinhoffing this shit?
People are dyslexic or not native speakers on here as well. English spelling is insane anyway. People fumble-eff around with giant sausage fingers on small screens. We collectively ruin our sight by constantly looking at screens from a foot away. Mistakes happen. I think I heard the first complaints about bad spelling on the collection of tubes in the late 90s. And we’re still here.
My mobile spelling has gotten to be garbage because my phone keyboard autocorrects Sometimes and I’ve gotten lazy about Swype/deleting mid-word mistakes. My pen/paper and also physical keyboard spelling remains persnickety
my phone corrects “the” to “Tue”. Thanks phone, exactly what I was going for apparently
Mine autocorrects “the” to “ther” sometimes. Not even a damn word.
My phones autocorrect has been garbage recently. I feel like a few years ago, it was much better at predicting what I meant to type, and I could easily edit on mobile using the suggested corrections. But now it is worse. Even with words or names I use all the time.
Ditto. My older phone (Lineage 17) doesn’t have this problem, compared to my current (Lineage 20)
How long have you had it? it took my current keyboard 3ish months to be as good as gboard which I had been using for years.
I dont have the learn as you type features on, I just use the stock keyboard with stock dictionary
See, I legitimately can’t even tell if you’re trolling or not.
I turned off autocorrect because it was changing valid words into other words. Having an obvious typo is preferable to changing the meaning completely, which happened enough times for me to notice.
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 spelled.
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.
I’ll have a look, but idk I was taught whole word in two languages and I can write a lot better than I can speak in at least 1.3 of them.
Did you downvote me because I pointed out the latest research doesn’t agree with your position?
I didn’t downvote you at all
My apologies. The downvote was on my post in under 15 seconds after I posted it. I had assumed the only one that would see it would be the person alerted to it. I guess Lemmy is growing up there are downvoters waiting to pounce instantly! We’re graduating to the big leagues now!
At average apparent text sizes, you only see ~4 letters clearly at a time, so it’s often enough that you can’t read a whole word at once. From there, there’s so many prefixes, suffixes, conjugations, compounds, and portmanteaus that it doesn’t make sense to just try to memorize the dictionary. What happens when you’re reading a flamboyant author that has tons of theasaraus usage and you come across words you’ve never heard in your life? You use context as best you can, but if there’s familiar roots in the word, you have a better chance of understanding it.
Also
spelt
That is a grain spelled “spelt”
You can memorize the patterns of each word and eventually you just understand language. Is that not how it’s meant to work?
This made me look up “whole word reading”, and it just made me irrationally angry. To be fair, English isn’t my native language and I don’t have a recollection of learning how to read, but “whole word learning” sounds insane. But like… Why would you do that if you are using an alphabet?
Check out the English PhD motherfucker over here
I’ve noticed mine got worse for some reason in the last five years. So many words that I’ve had no issue spelling I’ve lost confidence in spelling and need to look it up. Happened around COVID for me, not sure why.
Brain damage from stress lol. I find myself occasionally typing “there” instead of “their” and have to catch myself. I always reread what I type before sending so I fix it before sending, but I never made this mistake before. Somehow, over the years, probably from stress of various kinds (and this dates back to pre-COVID), I began to process language aurally and less visually, so if it sounds close enough and I’m not really thinking about what I’m typing, I’ll use the wrong word.
I’ve never typed “payed” before, though, and I see that across Reddit increasingly. It’s just crazy that that and “could/would of” have exploded over recent years.
Sounds? You pronounce words as you type?
Does your inner monologue not say what you are typing in your head as you type?
There are people who don’t have an inner monologue, they just think in abstraction. I have a friend who is like this. She tried to explain it to me and I just couldn’t even comprehend what a paradigm shift it is from how I thought all brains at a basic level worked.
It’s like when I learned that some people actually see images when they “picture something in your mind’s eye.” Had no idea that was literal.
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?
There is a mountain of anecdotal evidence, and a small mound of scientific research, suggesting that psychedelics can improve creativity even in the long term. Ask your doctor if LSD or psilocybin might help with your imagination deficit.
I’ve done LSD many times and while I’ve imagined impossible colours I could never imagine how that mistake might occur. Care to enlighten us?
I’m guilty of all these. I’m dyslexic and have a hard time spelling. At some point the personal dictionary on my phone learns words and I don’t get the warning anymore.
It also seems to be on the rise in online publications. Both spelling errors and synonym/grammar issues have increased significantly over the last year, most significantly in the last 3-4 months.
There’s a few I’ve noticed in the last seven years or so - lots of Americans can’t seem to conjugate “run”. It results in horrible sentences like “I used to ran this game” or “I have ran this event before”. No idea why that’s happening but squirt those people with a plant mister.
It’s even worse than people who don’t finish the words they’re writing “suppose to” and the like. In the brine with thee!
The distinction between simple past and past participle is disappearing in English more generally. I’m curious whether it will be considered quaint to distinguish them before I’m dead.
I’m always perplexed when I see porn videos with titles that use the continuous present rather than the simple present. One would have thought that the simple present would be the basic stuff for English as a second language, rather than the much less useful continuous present.
I speak a couple of languages in which there is no continuous present, but rather they use phrases such as “I sit and study Swedish” to mean “I’m studying Swedish (as in right now, that’s the task I’m doing)” or “I am in the process of reading a book”. They don’t change the form of the verb to highlight this continuous aspect, so perhaps they aren’t used to it.
Add to that that the continuous aspect in English is surprisingly complicated and arbitrary. If you try to nail down rules for how and when to use it, you might struggle. 😉 Folks struggling to use it correctly might be overcorrecting or merely confused.
There are, I’m sure, other reasons, but this is enough to account for some of what you’re seeing.
The Android keyboard always worked well for me, but I don’t trust them one bit. So I changed my phone keyboard into something that is worse at guessing what I’m trying to say, but I’m somewhat confident I am not being surveilled through it.
I started using it a month or two ago, and ever since I have started making a billion typos when writing on mobile.
Also, I guess the demography of the communities you’re in matters. I think quite a few of us over here are not native speakers. Sometimes I’ll also write with my keyboard set to the wrong language by accident, “leasing to all mines” of freaky autocorrects.
