I recently commented in Russian on a Russian-language YouTube channel about how I enjoy following a number of such channels to help me learn spoken Russian. My YT account uses a pseudonym that for some ill-conceived reason sounds Slavic, and my comment received a number of replies doubting that I’m an American rather than a Russian impostor. I’ll happily take that as a small victory since I usually make lots of little errors when writing and concentrating more on my thoughts than on my grammar and spelling. But I laughed out loud at this response:
“блять американец он канешно бля напесал без ашибак я русскй так написать немагу”
Which translates roughly like:
“fk shure he’s an american fk wrote without errers I’m rusian can’t rite like that”
The Internet is a great thing to know and to study.
But it’s also a huge garbage heap and without a big sense of humor and enormous patience it’s impossible to read the most of comments here.
There are a lot of mad, crazy people who make the comments just to pay attention to themselves, like this Russian guy!
LOL Мне очень нравится этот анекдот. (I love this anecdote.) As Evgueny notes, there is a lot of garbage on the internet. There are lots of misspelled English words and grammatically incorrect sentences on the internet, even when the author is supposedly “correcting” a non-native speaker’s writing! In learning Russian, I have often wondered whether native Russian speakers have problems with spelling, particularly because an unstressed “o” sounds like an “a” and so I could imagine that being a common error. (This is not unlike the difference between the English word endings “…ant” and “…ent” which sound the same in most instances and one just has to memorize how to spell a word with one or the other ending correctly. Even with spelling software, this remains an issue for many native speakers.) It is therefore very gratifying to me to see the Russian Youtube writer incorrectly use an “a” when an “o” is required and that he incorrectly wrote the letter “ш” (sh sound) because that is how the word is pronounced, although it is spelled with a “ч” (ch sound). Another mistake of his – “е” instead of " и" – is similarly related to how the word is often spoken, rather than how it is accurately spelled. These mistakes indicate to me that the writer doesn’t read and write often because if he did, he would recognize that what he wrote doesn’t “look right.” That he misspelled really common words itself says volumes.
In this case these “mistakes” are intentional for the purpose of making a joke, of course, but you are right. Though I very seldom comment on YouTube (it’s pretty wild out there), I sometimes will read the comments on a video that I know will provoke “interesting” responses. In addition to the types of errors you note, there are others in those rash, informal comments that are more likely an intentional form of shorthand. Using “чё” for “что” and “щас” for “сейчас”, for example.
Another thing that I see that warms the cockles of my heart is native speakers in the videos getting tongue-tied on phrases that would just as likely trip me up.
