Comment by happytoexplain
4 days ago
"How ___ like" is probably the single most common mistake I see among non-native speakers. Also, unlike other mistakes which can just sound informal, this one "sounds dumb", to use a mean phrase, but it's good to know for people trying to sound proper.
As a native English speaker who learned a foreign language (German) in high school, I have a pet theory about this, which is that I suspect most other languages use a word roughly equivalent to English "appear" (with which it would be correct to use "how", such as "how the atomic tests appeared from Los Angeles") even in colloquial speech, whereas English tends to reserve those synonyms for more formal registers of speech; in casual conversation in English, you wouldn't ask someone "how did he appear?" (unless you meant the other sense of "appear", as in "become visible"), but you would in, say, German (wie hat er ausgesehen? or wie sah er aus?). Of course, I'm sure learners of English as a foreign language are taught to say "what does he look like?" and not "how does he look like?", but I can imagine them struggling with remembering that just like I struggle with remembering genders and cases and declined forms in German.