I’ve understood the difference since I was 6 years old, I have vivid lucid memories of learning about this stuff in the first grade, but my “smart” phone’s voice-to-text still can’t figure it out.
Non-native English speakers usually don’t make such mistakes. Natives write “by ear” (which is how you initially learn your first language), so they can mix up homophonic words, whereas non-natives usually learned to write at the same time as they learned to speak the language, and they also had the rules and words explained 100% explicitly from the start.
I once had a teacher who was very meticulous about conditional sentences. She would get upset (not actually but this kind of fake upset) when you said “If I would’ve … then it would’ve …”, and that’s why conditional sentences are the only rule I know by heart and I improvise everything else :3
Native speaker here, never had any issues with this or any other common homophone in English. I mean, yes, spelling mistakes did occur, and we now have autocorrect to further screw things up. But I never “learned the rules” and still got everything consistently correct from a rather early age.
“Learning by ear” is just another excuse for laziness and/or ignorance. Pick up books, read extensively, and like anyone else not marinating in cultivated ignorance, you too can utilize the language effectively and correctly.
Native speaker here, never had any issues with this or any other common homophone in English.
Ok? I didn’t say all natives make such mistakes, it’s just that they’re substantially more prone to make them, “by design”. Non-natives will make various spelling mistakes too, just of different sorts, rarely those based on homophones.
“Learning by ear” is just another excuse for laziness and/or ignorance
But that’s how every native language is learned, it’s not “laziness”. You listen to your parents and learn to speak years before you develop usable reading abilities. Writing is learned afterwards, and largely bases itself on your knowledge of the oral form of the language. This applies to any language written in an alphabet (i.e. disregarding Chinese and similar).
Pick up books, read extensively, and like anyone else not marinating in cultivated ignorance, you too can utilize the language effectively and correctly.
If this humble advice is directed at me - thanks a lot, but we’ve been talking about native English speakers, which I am not.
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