Ha ha, a friend of mine from Iceland pointed that out to me. It was actually intentional. Speaking generally, you guys tend to have far more trouble over-punctuating sentences than you do under-punctuating them. But if you want, I can give you a sentence with a comma in it:

"Error014, who smells of elderberries, happens to be a hampster."

"who smells of elderberries" is guarded with commas because otherwise the subject/verb word order is messed up. And in English you really can't get in the way of that subject/verb order. Because we don't have those fancy word endings anymore like you do.


Nope. Muphry's Law did cross my mind once, but I figured since pretty much none of you know where to place commas anyway, if I made a mistake I would probably get away with it.


Ha ha. In my experience it's kind of a universal thing for people to ignore those requests because they don't want to look like a stickler or be discouraging for people who are using a language they're not extremely familiar with. Trying to converse in a language you're not very good at is probably the easiest way to sound like an idiot, and people everywhere are sensitive to that. At the same time, however, people tend to be kind of flattered that you're trying to learn their language, so they're prone to not correcting you when you make insignificant little mistakes.

Depending upon how you look at that, it's a negative feedback loop, because you're making mistakes and you're not learning from them. But the way I see it, it's just evidence that people everywhere can appreciate the difficulty attached to picking up a new language. They want to be accommodating about it because they're holding faith that you will improve eventually.

That being said, if nobody thought your mistakes were worth correcting, they probably weren't.

As for me, this is the first time that I've ever openly criticized any of you guys for any English mistakes, because frankly, it has never bothered me at all. I've always understood you just fine. In fact, the truth is, I admired you guys for being essentially bilingual, when I (at least at the time) knew hardly a word of Deutsch. Maybe you guys imagine us Americans are too obsessed with burgers and guns and Hollywood to care about such things; not so. I told my sister's husband a few months ago that there was no way I was going to die knowing only English, and I meant it.

That being said, the reason I posted this thread is because, having identified commas as your guys'* biggest stumbling block over the many years that I've floated around here, I thought it would be worthwhile to make an appearance and bring it to your collective attention. Because really. You guys suck.

*: Ugh, "your guys'". I'm not even kidding when I say that not having any second person plural form in English is awkward even for native speakers.

our english teacher in school always told us that it's best for us to never use commas at all in english.

i find the german comma rules very tricky though. you have to really be an expert in grammar to get it right.

the english way actually sounds easier to me.