[notahacker]

To be considered competent in written English you also have to master a system of orthography so preposterously inconsistent and divorced from the spoken language that native-speaking kids have competitions to show off their prowess at rote-learning spellings of words; far more challenging than remembering whether the nouns are der, die oder das. In many other languages, literacy involves memorizing a few basic rules and knowing how words sound.

Given the vast amount of energy wasted on memorizing spelling quirks, compared with nearly all other languages, it's not surprising that many people, including you, frequently make other mistakes in their written English. When a language consists more of exceptions than rules one can't be too harsh on people for wrongly applying a rule.

To use the programming language you used elsewhere: English is PHP... it's easy to use as badly as everybody else uses it.