Val
New kind of native English speakers?

Recently I have seen more and more people here who claim they are native English speakers, but their grammar looks horrible.

Using 'am' instead of 'I am', writing 'I' as 'i', missing articles and a lot of typos.

Some of them pretend to be from the US or UK, others from countries where English one of the official languages.

Who are they? Scammers, just not educated people or youth with a new trend in internet communications?

May 28, 2019 7:52 AM
Comments · 39
16
This made me laugh - I'm a native english speaker and I can confirm that we definitely do speak like this in informal settings or online. But yes, we often drop the pronoun 'I' to say things such as 'am just popping out to the shop' or 'am looking forward to...'. Don't worry too much about it - it is a very lazy way of speaking and would only really be used in family/friends environments where you're all just chatting casually.
May 28, 2019
12

There has always been a small number of italki members who pretend to be native language speakers.

The types of mistakes you've identified would not be made by native speakers who respect the language.

So, are these people pretending to be native speakers or are our language skills deteriorating?


from Princeton University...

Recent graduates, including those with university degrees, seem to have no mastery of the language at all. They cannot construct a simple declarative sentence, either orally or in writing. They cannot spell common, everyday words. Punctuation is apparently no longer taught. Grammar is a complete mystery to almost all recent graduates.      Attitudes toward English Teaching, 1961

From every college in the country goes up the cry, "Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate." Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments.     1917

The vocabularies of the majority of high-school pupils are amazingly small. I always try to use simple English, and yet I have talked to classes when quite a minority of the pupils did not comprehend more than half of what I said.      Methods of Study in English," 1889

Unless the present progress of change [is] arrested...there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman...    1833


Conclusion: There will always be those who do not respect their language

 

May 28, 2019
9
Dropping the pronoun in English is not simply an “uneducated native speaker” — it’s either non-native, inappropriately casual, or very lazy. Frankly, it doesn’t matter if it’s non-native or lazy-native. Why would any English speaker write in such a lazy manner to a potential language partner? I mean, if that’s their opening line, how much do you think they plan on contributing to the language learning relationship?

Also, it seems to me that recent months have seen a huge increase in scammers (I guess the good news is that the site is getting very popular). Anyone with suspicious messages is welcome to show them to me for my opinion not just on the grammar, but on whether it is pragmatically something a native English speaker would really write.

May 29, 2019
9
There are a lot of Americans that don't know how to write correctly, but they probably aren't trying to learn a second or third language if they can't manage their first language. I believe the people you mentioned are probably from countries where English might be an official language, but it isn't their native language. It is likely there are a lot of guys (males) from unnamed geographical areas who are pretending to be native English speakers in attempts to get contact info from females on this site. 
May 28, 2019
9
To be honest, although it might sound a bit sad, but I'm used to people on italki lying about their native language as well as their objectives.
May 28, 2019
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