I mostly learned English from the computer and books, and I could never understand how it is even possible to write "it's" when you mean "its", or vice versa. They are simply completely different words!
Then I went to my first multi-day conference abroad, and after three days of speaking mostly English, I caught myself doing the same mistake. I guess it's easy when you think in sounds, and not in letters.
@deshipu that's super interesting!
@deshipu that was exactly my experience too. As soon as my English became good enough and I started thinking in sounds, I started making all the same mistakes.
@deshipu I think you're right, it's mostly native and more fluent writers that get this wrong and likely, as you say, in proportion to the amount they speak/listen rather than read/write.
@deshipu It's not simple, though; 200 years or more ago the spellings of those two words were generally the other way round - though spelling was less homogeneous then anyway.
It's understandable that people think “it's” is possessive given the use of apostrophe “s” on nouns for that though “his” and “hers” ought to be a clue.
“One's” is just evil.
@edavies I don't think it actually matters whether they are consistent or "logical" or not — spelling is something you learn by use anyways. Contractions are ambiguous like all other abbreviations — that's the whole idea, you make it shorter but still understandable in context. English is a low-context language, so it's not that bad.
I'm just so annoyed by those mistakes popping up in newspapers, books, articles, etc. — it just shows that the author didn't even bother with proofreading.
@deshipu Native speaker of it here, and I'm just as floored by such idiocy. "They put they're things away," is a sentence I've actually seen before.
By a native English speaker.
@deshipu English has a lot of words that sound the same that catch people. Some more than others. If I'm speaking out loud while typing, I've found I'm more likely to make a mistake. The most common ones are that I see are probably {there, their, and they're}, {your, you're}, and {two, to, too}. Then there are words that have different meanings depending on context like lead. Lead can mean the verb to lead, the element, a clue, or part of a electrical component. The language is confusing!