Commonly confused words

There are some words that are often misused. It drives me insane when I see native English speakers use “your” instead of “you’re” (I have no problems with “youre”, I can decipher that quite easily) and vice versa. Some people also use “their” instead of “they’re” or—even worse—instead of “there”. I can see no fucking connection between “there” and “their”, the words obviously have different root.

As my English education consists mainly of reading/writing, I absorbed at least these simple cases, and totally fail to understand how any native Englishman/American/Aussie with any basic education can make these mistakes (over and over again).

When trying to find out why people so often write “loose” when they mean “lose” (don’t ever do that or I’ll have to kill you) I found several interesting sites. One said that you can pronounce the word out loud to find out how to write it, that when you pronounce it “lu:s” then you write it as “loose” and when you pronounce it “lu:z” then you write it as “lose”. Actually I got just the reversed information from this one – that loose is not pronounced the same as lose. :-)

Then I found a very useful site about commonly confused words. The site explains the differencies very clearly and offers short tests to confirm that you understand it.

The words in which people make mistakes but I don’t care:
advice/advise, desert/dessert, clothes/cloths, later/latter, it’s/its (its basically the same, some people just dont like to write apostrophes), and probably many many more… but I don’t care…
The words in which people make mistakes and it annoys me:
accept/except, affect/effect, among/between, farther/further, hear/here, hole/whole, knew/new/knoew/no, loose/lose, peace/piece (and what about peas? I guess they forgot), than/then, their/the’re/there, threw/through, to/too/two, wear/where/were, your/you’re

The words in which I make mistakes and it annoys me:
can/may (depends whether I’m concentrated), fewer/less (I use less exclusively), lay/lie (I finally learned the difference today after all these years)

All the rest are the ones I consider unimportant so I just don’t bother. ;-)