mixing up pronouns

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Does this happen to anyone else?

I confuse "he and she" a lot for example. I will have an entire conversation talking about a male friend and suddenly the other person will you "you mean he, right?" I will feel sooo confused, because I swear that is what i said. I have gotten people mad over mixing up pronouns in conversation to the point that I am told I do not pay attention to what comes out of my mouth!

Yeah I do this too, mix up gender pronouns and mix up words in sentences and get words jumbled up sometimes. My mom does it too. We say we have lazy brains. I think everyone does this sometimes though.

I'm even worse when I'm emotional (upset or something) like a couple weeks ago I was really excited about my mom bringing home sushi because she said she would and when she didn't I said/shouted "I forgot the it -you forgot the sushi!" She laughed at me.

Last edited by daydreamer84 on 07 Nov 2012, 1:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

Are you Filipino, Mirror21? A lot of first-generation immigrants from the P.I. make the same mistake.

No worries, though ... as long as you're aware of it, you can try to correct it.

A lot of native speakers make this kind of mistake though. We talked about it in Linguistics class...there's a difference between linguistic competence and linguistic performance. The way we speak doesn't necessarily reflect our knowledge of the language because it's constrained by a lot of factors like if you're tired or wakeful and alert, upset, distracted, can't remember a word (differences in working memory) etc. It seems obvious...but people do forget this so my prof made a point of discussing it.

Someone I know from Hong Kong makes exactly the same mistake very often. Other people often laugh about it. That Hongkonger person said that in their language "he" and "she" are written differently but pronounced in the same way or something and that's why they tend to mix them up in English. Sounds understandable. So I wonder what the first language of the OP is.

As a child I did (it's a symptom of ASDs).

Prefer to avoid using personal pronouns as a teenager/adult, especially to begin a sentence; I tend to be ok after it's started (it just feels uncomfortable). Would rather refer to myself in third person than first, but it tends to seem odd to others when you do it (well, odder).

I work with trans people, so I'm used to very carefully watching what I say when it comes to pronouns and checking before I say any that it's the correct one. If in doubt, use "they"!

No but I am native Puerto Rican, born and bred. Got obsessed with languages around the 6th grade and tried a few. French made my mouth ache, italian is nice, but kind of hard to get good resources at the time. I learned English instead, supplementing my public school education with books, television and music, until i got it down good enough.



Spanish. PR spanish to be precice, which is a mixture of english, spanish (as in from spain spanish) and Taino words (PR island natives now extinct). So me and mexicans barely understand each other, for example!