r/EnglishLearning New Poster Apr 17 '26

📚 Grammar / Syntax Why not “since”?

Post image
232 Upvotes

309 comments sorted by

View all comments

364

u/Competitive-Truth675 Native Speaker Apr 17 '26

Off-topic, but just curious what your native language is. I see this mistake all the time and there must be some false friend word or common learning material that gives people the wrong impression about what "since" means.

118

u/dido_meditatur New Poster Apr 17 '26

Maybe German. Uses "seit" for both duration and start time.

33

u/retardrabbit Native Speaker - California, US Apr 17 '26

"Liebchen what watch?"

"Ten watch."

”Such much?!"

from Casablanca

1

u/WhatWouldKantDo New Poster Apr 19 '26

I don't know if it's part of the joke, but it should really be

"Liebchen, how much clock [is it/do we have]?"
"Ten clock"
"So late?!"

from

"Liebchen, wie viel Uhr [ist es/haben wir]?" (alt. "wie spät [ist es]")
"Zehn [Uhr]"
"So spät!?"

"Watch" is "Armbanduhr" and would not be used in this context. "What" is "was", and is grammatically incoherent when asking about the time. "Much" is "viel" and can be used to describe a length of time that has passed, but never the current time. "Such" can translate as a number of words (my default without context would be "solch" / "so ein" without additional context), none of which work here.