No problem. Thank you for being receptive to my comment.
Sometimes people get mad, and I don’t get why as I love to learn new things and it may help other people who may be non-native speakers to learn the quirks of English.
Here are some possible reasons for people getting mad if you’re really wondering why it happens:
- unsolicited advice can make people feel stupid (you love to learn, not everyone does)
- comments like yours can be used as a way of making fun of OP to disregard their point without actually interacting with it
- being corrected on a slip up and not something you sincerely don’t know can be annoying (either towards the person correcting you or towards yourself for “not knowing something this simple”)
- I don’t know about others but my school life never taught me how to deal with criticism, if you made a mistake you didn’t study properly and should go back to doing that instead of being explained what went wrong and why (this one might sound a worse than it really was but you get the point)
I’m not saying you did any of those things and I’m right there with you on learning but the knee-jerk reactions often do have a reason behind them. There’s also the whole issue with how polarized social media is these days and the willingness to listen or admit to a mistake can be a difficult thing to stomach (“it’s a sign of weakness”).
I hope that helps!
Thanks for this. It really does help to understand the reasons.
I would say that I always try to preface my unsolicited advice to try and convey that I am not shitting on people or being condescending, as I did here. I do this so people can feel comfortable that I’m doing it to be nice and without any malice at all. I know you said I didn’t do any of these things, I just wanted to explain my thought process.
Sorry, native speaker and language teacher here and I disagree. This is dialect dependent, but in my dialect at least, it’s the glottal stop at the beginning of a vowel sound that triggers it. Saying “an European” for me is like saying “an yellow.”
I’m confused as you say you don’t agree, but also using an European doesn’t sound right, which is right as it should be a European as European starts with a yoo sound rather than a vowel sound.
It would be a yellow as yellow also starts with a consonant sound.
