Current Events > As a non English native speaker, there is one thing I don't get

(+) Yeah! (+)

I learned English at school, playing games, reading books, watching movies, etc. My native language is Spanish BTW.

There is a mistake a I keep seeing in GameFAQs, and all around the internet, that I can't understand how it is so common. I can't think of something in Spanish quite like that. People confuse a lot "their" and "they're", and they both mean something completely different. Is it because those people don't understand that "they're" actually comes from "they are"? Because I would guess anyone would know the difference between "they are" and "their".

It's something I've been wondering for years now, and I thought I could ask it here.

Edit: also with your and you're
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Some people mix them up, others probably don't know that there is a difference. A few, perhaps, are just too lazy to fix it when typing something up.

i think everyone knows the difference but typing habits will have a person favor 1 their over other there's and they're's
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Because, language was sound long before it was written. Homophones are indistinct when spoken, and there's some sort of assumption that the same applies to text.

That's why effect/affect are consistently misused, why your/you're and their/there/they're are treated as interchangeable, and why nobody seems to know how to spell "segue" or "voila" among others, and why the Grocer's Apostrophe persists.

Eamon696 posted...

A few, perhaps, are just too lazy to fix it when typing something up.

This.
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They're spoken exactly the same, that's why there's some confusion. People who speak fluently but perhaps have lackluster written grammar skills are the ones making the mistake.
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It's a pretty easy mistake to make just being absent minded
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Partly that they sound identical.
Partly that some people are lazy.
Partly that smartphone keyboards will sometimes just autocorrect to one over the other regardless of context and they either don't notice, or don't care. (And a lot of people use their phones for this place.)
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Questionmarktarius posted...

Because, language was sound long before it was written. Homophones are indistinct when spoken, and there's some sort of assumption that the same applies to text.

That's why effect/affect are consistently misused, why your/you're and their/there/they're are treated as interchangeable, and why nobody seems to know how to spell "segue" or "voila" among others, and why the Grocer's Apostrophe persists.

well, in the case of "segue", the motorized personal scooter thing obfuscates
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