Spaniards learning English spell 'because' in 237 ways, reveals Cambridge University

Linguists studied a corpus of written text and found variations of the word that included 'becouse', 'becaus', 'beacuse', and 'becuose'.

They also found spelling mistakes were most common in the words 'which', 'comfortable', 'accommodation', 'possible', 'believe', 'different', 'bicycle', 'environment', 'beautiful', and any word with a 'ght' in it – 'right' or 'caught' were frequently spelled as 'rigth' or 'caugth'.

Spanish people learning English tend to miss out letters, write letters in the wrong order or even add extra ones and frequently spelt words phonetically.

Students have fewer problems spelling nouns than verbs, only 30 per cent of written errors were grammatical and they are inclined to add an 'e' before words starting with an 's' and a consonant, as would be the case in Spanish, resulting in 'especific', 'especial', 'espectacular' and 'especialised'.

Common 'false friends', or words which sound the same as in another language but mean something totally different, were also identified from the corpus.

Spaniards speaking or writing English regularly misused words such as 'assist' (asistir in Spanish means 'to attend'); 'actual' (actual in Spanish is 'current' or 'up to date'); 'comprehensive' (a person who is comprensivo is 'understanding', whereas comprensible is 'understandable' and if something is 'comprehensive', in Spanish it is completo or detallado); 'sympathetic' (simpático means a person who is fun, charismatic and pleasant); 'fabric' (fábrica means 'factory'); 'march' (marchar means 'to leave'), and 'coherent' (coherente means 'consistent').

In general, Spanish people write English far better than they speak it, the study found.

Cambridge University came to these conclusions after studying a corpus of 42 million words taken from exams sat by over 200,000 students whose native language is Spanish.