With english not being ur 1st language, what's the weirdest mistake you've made learning it?

[sarah-crows]

i vividly remember writing guy as gay for years and my teachers not correcting it, i even pronounced it as GAY , now imagine a five year old reading her essay and saying : the GAYS in my class are very loud
and that's just one of the many mistakes i made hh
i only got better by watching English movies and paying attention to their pronunciation

[Kuma]

Mmmm I can't remember anything punctual. I didn't study that much until I got into gaming, that was motivation enough to learn. I rarely have any issues since then.

[vothnthorvaldson]

My mother does the guy/gay thing, it's hilarious sometimes, very embarassing most times

Mine: when I was starting with English, l thought 'You're welcome' meant people were inviting me to their home

[sarah-crows]

omg that's gold

[Crusoe]

I can't really remember, but Dutch people like me are generally not great at pronouncing the th sound, so I've said three as tree multiple times in the past.

[sarah-crows]

i do too some times, it's was hard to remember

[Puck]

I always thought dutch people have a better english pronounciation than germans though.
But I recognize dutch-english right away

[Puck]

I didn´t put any effort into pronounciation when I was younger because it felt weird, the "th" thing still
gives me trouble. I learned a lot of english from watching MTV and american/english movies, songs
and most from talking to people.

One mistake I did when I wasn´t used to speaking english. I was at a concert in spain and tried
to flirt with a girl so I went to her and said "you are sweet". I later found out that you wouldn´t
say that in english, I wanted to say something like "you are cute", awkward situation because
that was pretty much all I said

[Maps]

Lol I’m American, but when I moved to Ireland for grad school it took me a moment to realize that Cork people pronounced th with t’s. I was trying to get a phone provider and my cousin kept telling me to use “tree mobile” and I wasn’t finding a tree mobile anywhere. Ended up being three mobile.

Even English speakers can be confused by other English speakers. Bless y’all for learning this language.

[Scarlet_Cryptid]

I can second that. English is such a broken language; I'm impressed by anyone who endeavors to learn it. And I'm an American, too. Born and raised speaking English. That doesn't stop me from being confused by it on a semi-regular basis. Like, this fun grammar rule that doesn't seem to be actually taught in school, but we all sort of absorb automatically anyway:

Adjectives, writes Mark Forsyth, professional stickler and the author of The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase, “absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.”

And... like... It's one of those things native speakers know without knowing that they know it? And good luck trying to explain to someone who's learning English WHY getting adjectives in the 'wrong' order sounds weird? WTF English. I thought I knew you.

[vothnthorvaldson]

Ah yes, Cork accent is fun.
My parents used to live there before I was born, and we went back several times as a family for holidays.
I have a vivid memory of someone giving me back money with a loud, exclaimed 'TTIRTYTREE'!

[sarah-crows]

could've been worst lol

[petto_lizz]

I totally forgot the meanings of the phrasal verbs!
Or sometimes I say long words, so I spell it slowly and repeat it a couple of times!

[sarah-crows]

hh my second language is frensh so it was very confusing to me that they basecaly are opposites of each other when it come to grammar and such

[Maps]

Hahaha!! I can hear it now!

Another one I loved was when they pronounced (for me) “bar” as “bear”. “Get your drink at the bear!”

[childofbooks]

My first language does not have grammatical gender. So it has one word "o" for 3rd person singular pronoun instead of "he she it" in English. As a result, I sometimes get confused and talk to people using the wrong gender word without realizing and some who are very sensitive to this matter thought I insulted them five times :')

Nowadays, I'm learning Spanish and the grammatical gender thing is driving me crazy..

[sarah-crows]

i'm learning korean, worst decition i ever made

[GloamingCat]

When I was younger I didn't realize that the English for "assinado" (Portuguese) was "signed", so instead of abbreviating it in English I used the abbreviation for "assinado", which is... "ass". So a few of my English texts ended with "Ass.: my name" lol

[lynestjules]

My first language is French. I had a really hard time not rolling my R's .
I used to say "tree" instead of "three" a lot. "Thr" sound was hard to get right.
I also used to write "cattle" instead of "castle". My first draft of my comic had a lot of "cattle". lol

I still to this day can't say "Monopoly" correctly. It always comes out "Mono Poly".

I'm fully bilingual in both English and French. But, I still mess up sometimes. I mess up in French too.

[Crusoe]

Yeah it's defined a specific accent. Generally we're pretty decent English speakers though. I don't know a single person who can't make themselves understandable in it.