'Do TEFL' points out that in 2022, there were 2 billion English speakers around the world, only 400 million of whom are native speakers.

The r/engrish subreddit is practically ancient by now. Founded all the way back in late September of 2008, it has grown by leaps and bounds over the years. At the time of writing, the community had expanded to over 781k members (or ‘grammar police’ as they like to jokingly call themselves). 

The group itself is all about having a good laugh by sharing spelling mistakes, weird grammar, and messed-up-looking text. Everything’s done in the spirit of comedy, and there’s no meanness here. After all, we’re all human. We all make mistakes. However, not everyone’s errors are strange enough to make the entire internet giggle.

The moderator team running the group has laid out some simple-to-follow rules to maintain a high standard of quality for the content. For example, they ask the community to avoid posting photos or videos of typos or really minor accidental mistakes. If the author clearly knows how to spell the word correctly, it probably shouldn’t be shared on r/engrish.

On top of that, the mods don’t want to see any posts about mistakes made by auto-correct or anyone passing off intentional mistakes as content-worthy pics. Meanwhile, nobody should be making fun of any grammar mistakes that kids make. Everyone has to start somewhere, it would be mean to poke fun at someone who’s completely new to the language.

Learning a new language—any language—might seem like a daunting task. But in this day and age, it’s easier than ever. Still not easy. But easier! That’s because there are so many learning resources, both paid and free, available if you have even a basic internet connection. There are plenty of books, videos, projects, and apps that make the entire process as pleasant and smooth as possible. 

However, even if you have access to all the resources in the world, what really matters is having the patience and discipline to learn. Step by little step. Having a growth-centered mindset really helps here. Instead of getting frustrated at all the tiny mistakes you keep making, try to view them as proof that you’re taking on a monumental task.

And any effort that you put in means that you’re miles ahead of someone who’s decided to quit. However much time you spend on learning a new language, try to do it daily. And remember the reason why you started in the first place. It’ll help motivate you when things get really tough.

Previously, Bored Panda spoke to a journalist and communications specialist who was kind enough to walk us through the peculiarities of English spelling, as well as how spell-check affects us.

"English spelling is such a train wreck, with its myriad silent letters and wildly varying pronunciations for letters and letter combinations. But also, articles (a/an/the) tend to be difficult for people whose native language doesn’t have them, and our tense/aspect blend with combinations of auxiliary verbs makes the English verb system tricky even for native speakers sometimes," she told us during an earlier interview.

Though spell check is a great tool for catching typos and misspellings, it’s far from perfect. "Where it’s more of a curse than a blessing is with homonyms/homophones because it won’t flag a word that is a word, but not the word you want. Think affect/effect, who’s/whose, led/lead but also word pairs like form/from and not-synonyms like bemuse/amuse, etc," the specialist said.

The expert pointed out that English isn’t spelled as it sounds. This is due to a wide range of reasons, including when the words actually entered the language, where they came from, and when the particular spellings were first codified. However, a complete overhaul of the language to make it more ‘logical’ isn’t really possible. 

"People have proposed spelling overhauls before but they tend to not go anywhere, probably because it’s such a daunting project—could we all agree on what the changes would be?—and because then an entire body of texts would become basically a foreign language to the next generation. Many factors in addition to spelling contribute to a language’s 'character,' but some spellings do have echoes of archaic English—in my opinion, it would be a little bit sad to lose some of that.”

If you’d like some more grammar-related humor in your life, feel free to check out Bored Panda’s previous features about the r/engrish subreddit.