Quote:
Originally Posted by John Carroll
I just wonder if making contractions is hard for readers who read English as a second language. If so, are there any inparticular that make it difficult?
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I guess this depends on one's level of English. I have no problem with it (I'm not a native speaker) and I think most people that know English well enough to read books will not have problems either.
I was following a
Twitter account that went around correcting people's grammatical errors and I was impressed with all the stupid mistakes people were doing! I know you're/your and there/their/they're are common mistakes but I had never heard of, or seen someone say "
would of" instead of "would have" before and this guy kept correcting them.
All of these people were native English speakers.
Now, I bring this up to make an observation - foreigners often know better grammar and grammatical rules of a certain language than the native speakers. I am obviously not comparing a student of English and an English writer, but for normal people this is usually true.
Native speakers usually "just know" the rules, without knowing them, because they sound right to their ear. They will use present perfect when needed because they know the sentence requires it, but will often be unable to explain why it is so. People that take English as a foreign language have to be taught when to use present perfect so they will know to use it when they refer to a past event that has visible consequences in the present.
I don't think contractions make it much harder. Yes, sometimes it would be easier without them, but the problem most people have is usually vocabulary in my experience. My mother used to read romances in English and she would much more often ask for a meaning of a word than for help with some tense.
I'm writing from personal experience - I studied several foreign languages and my observation applies to other languages too, not just English.