English Grammar Stuff That My Dad Habitually Overlooks

Wazzup Pilipinas!

The English language, in my opinion, is one of the easiest yet puzzling languages in the world. Many people believe that it is easy because of the fact that countless people all over the world know the language and learn it effortlessly. Because of this, it is often titled as the “universal language”, despite it only being second to Mandarin as the most spoken language in the world.

Now, for some people, English is a tricky language to be familiar with. There are things such as the Oxford comma, homonyms (words that sound alike but have different meanings), contractions, even the lesson that I’m sure we all took in class called subject-verb agreement and the like. Although it is generally easy to communicate in English, some of us, if not all, have their own little flaws, especially when speaking. I’ve heard that in places such as the United States of America, English grammar is usually not a big deal as long as your point is understood.

Putting that aside, as an entitled grammar Nazi (not to say that I don’t make mistakes, mind you,) and loving daughter to my dearest father, I’ve gathered up these habitually overlooked English mistakes I’ve noticed in him so far:

1. Didn’t + past tense of the verb – This is often the case. He always says things like, “I didn’t visited that place,” making the sentence a double negative.

2. More + comparative form of the adjective – Kyle says our dad does double positives, too. Examples include “more brighter,” “more healthier,” etc. He even said the latter in a taglish interview once.

3. Mispronouncing or incorporating the Filipino accent in English words – I’m sure we’re all guilty of this at some point in our lives. The “Filipino accent”, if I remember correctly, includes things like lengthening the sound of the letter “i” in some words, like how we pronounce it in Filipino. As a result, we make words such as “cylinder” sound like “ceeleender” and sometimes even vice-versa like saying “this” when he really means “these”. Still on mispronouncing words, he sometimes pronounces every letter in words like “interesting” and “chocolate”.

4. Prepositions – Prepositions are words used to show noun's relationship to other words in a sentence. These are words like “in”, “on”, “at”, “after”, “during”, “below”, “between” and the like. He frequently asks about the first three. Just now, he asked me about this, and I scrolled down to this number to answer his question.

5. Hard consonants instead of soft consonants - May it be just my own understanding, but dad sometimes mispronounces consonants, too, particularly on words like "article". Instead of it sounding with a soft "r" like "wear", it sounds like "arrrticle". (How do I put this?) It sounds like there's a hard vibration somewhere when he's talking.   

Although I’d love to list more, these are the things that immediately came to my mind; however, all in all, I firmly believe that he’s a notable communicator in English, otherwise he wouldn’t be a freelance blogger at present.


Contributed by Hannah Krystelle Del Rosario

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