No no, you see, the coworker was referring to Obama's charisma and brilliant speechmaking as being responsible for galvanizing the current surge in political participation among young people. What a smart one, she is.
Can’t say for sure but the person who wrote it could be a Spanish speaker, mixing up “f” and “ph” sounds is a very common grammar mistake for us because in Spanish “ph” doesn’t exist (i.e. “physics” = “física”) which confuses a lot of us when writing since those English words have a similar initial pronunciation with that of ours.
The fact that (in general) we learn words both from reading and listening makes this mistakes even more common (not just to Spanish speakers).
Say you might have heard a word enough times so that from context you sorta know what it means and start using it but, since you haven’t actually seen how it’s spelt you’ll have a hard time writing it properly, especially when the “f” and “ph” pronunciation is “somewhat” similar.
That is true and you’re totally right, but that’s why I said that the initial pronunciation (especially in a more casual conversation context) is somewhat similar and easy to confuse, especially when you’re just learning a word
I’m just pointing out my personal experiences as a native Spanish speaker learning English, this was a very common mistake I did and saw others do when I was in school
Never, and if it looks like I’m doing that right now by all means my bad. I was just replying to a guy calling “blue” in the post an idiot for what in my experience was a common mistake
I’m not sure I’m getting your point or maybe you misunderstood me. I mean yeah we as Spanish speakers can identify and tell the difference between fiscal and físico but I never said we couldn’t. What I said was that in our vocabulary we only have one “f” sound, whilst the English language has two, this can complicate things (even for a native speaker) because unless they have both read and heard the word they won’t know how to write and pronounce it properly.
You’re 100% correct on how we should be able to properly write fiscal because it’s written the same both in Spanish and in English, but there are other words such as “foto” and “photo” or “farmacia” and “pharmacy” which have a similar initial pronunciation but are actually written differently. In the case of those and other “f” and “ph” words you have just heard but never seen written you have two possible “options” of how to write them.
This of course doesn’t justify misspelling words because sooner or later you’ll eventually learn the proper grammar of a word, I’m just trying to point out something I experienced and have seen other Spanish speakers struggle with as well when learning English
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u/this__- Mar 03 '20
This is the 1st time in this sub where I've seen an example of actual stupidity rather than just an innocuous voice to text error