"Me Talk Pretty One Day"

"People start love you soon."

This sentence is grammatically incorrect for two reasons:

1) The sentence is missing the auxiliary verb "will."

2) The verb "love" is missing an infinitive marker.

The sentence should read: "People will start to love you soon."


When learning new languages people often have trouble with grammar, phonology, morphology and syntax. I remember getting frustrated with my classmates in Spanish class when they would pronounce Spanish consonants with an aspiration. It would drive me crazy and I would accuse them of not trying hard enough to sound Spanish. I started thinking that maybe they were just lazy but now that I understand phonology a bit better I understand that Spanish phonemes might be difficult to pronounce for some people. Another phoneme that caused a lot of problems was the /r/ but I was a little more forgiving if they couldn't pronounce it. Another feature of Spanish that they had to adjust to was placing the adjectives after the noun.

As a native English speaker who is fluent in Spanish, one mistake that I commonly make is translating idiomatic expressions in English directly into Spanish. For example, in English you can "throw" a party. In Spanish the verb for "throw" is "tirar" but you wouldn't say "Voy a tirar una fiesta" but rather "Voy a tener una fiesta."

Another feature that I have noticed about people who are bilingual is that whichever language they are stronger in usually affects the way they speak the second language. The direct translation of idioms is one example but my Bengali friend tells me she sometimes says things in Bengali which are grammatically in English and she also uses simple verb conjugations and tenses to express herself.