Why do native-English speakers correct the grammar of non-native English speakers even though they understand them well enough?
Even non-English people do it!For the sake of knowledge and learning, of course!I have absolutely no qualms about correcting other’s grammar and spelling, and as such don't mind when others correct mine, because I'm a learner first and a teacher second.I do tend to laugh it off sometimes like “ah, yeah, does it really matter?” in a bit of a snide manner, but secretly I'm taking notes and telling myself “nope, dude, you fucked up. Try again next time!”And you should too!Just because I understand you doesn't mean it isn't uncomfortable to hear your grammatical errors. Also, for the sake of your own language learning, the one who knows “better” or “differently” should never hold his/her tongue, unless of course, it was a small grammatical error.But things like “I wanting to go with you, too!” just sounds painful to someone who speaks “Perfectly good English”, and they will usually say without thinking, “want.” Or “You mean want.”It's intended to be taken as a suggestion, and it's the polite thing to do to accept it is to say “Oh, right. I want to go with you, too!”Even if you don't believe they are right.
Would you, as an English speaker, mind if a non-native English speaker makes grammatical mistakes when communicating with others?
No, I would not and do not mind when non-native speakers make grammar mistakes. I would like to add two points to the copious, apt answers already given. 1) Non-native speakers, you are the majority. It is generally estimated that non-native speakers of English outnumber native speakers of English by a ratio of 3 to 1. (David Crystal is usually cited as the source of this estimate.) It is courteous of the non-native speaker to be concerned about the feelings of the minority. 2) No matter how many mistakes you make, native speakers of English will almost always be able to understand what you are trying to say.I came upon this second insight in two ways. Some years back there was a test circulating on the internet: a dozen or so sentences in English with every word in the sentences misspelled. I, and just about every native speaker of English I imagine, could identify the correct meaning of all twelve sentences. The insight was reinforced by the thousands and thousands of language mistakes I have corrected over the years. It eventually dawned on me that in order to correct someone’s grammar I had to be able to know what the writer intended to say. In other words, the grammar mistakes didn’t prevent me from recognizing the intended meaning. It was a very rare occurrence that I could not understand what a student was trying to say because of grammar mistakes.Having learned a couple of foreign languages over the years and witnessed various reactions to non-native speakers of English, I would say that the strongest and most inappropriate reactions tend to come from people who are unilingual. Many unilingual individuals are slow to recognize that a non-native speaker of English is a linguistic superior to the person who can only speak one language. Unfortunately, for some people anything that is different from what they are accustomed to is perceived as inferior and/or threatening. On the other hand, anyone who has learned a second or third language is likely to be empathetic and sympathetic with the non-native speaker of English.Also, non-native speakers of any language have to get used to a double standard. As soon as you are perceived as a non-native speaker, people begin to take note of your mistakes. If a native speaker of the language made exactly the same mistake, people tend not to notice or explain the mistake away; i.e, “he was being funny.”
Hello,I'm not a native english speaker and I need you to help me to find the correct form in these sentences?
a) The man fell over because he wasn't wearing/didn't wear his wooden leg. b)When he fell over,the flights attendants were running/ran to help him. c)I read/was reading Tolstoy's War and Peace on thr flight. d)Mandy wasn't worried because she saw/had seen accidents like this before. e)The plane had been flying/had flown for a couple of hours when the incident happened/had happened. f)They tought he had drunk/ had been drinking. g)As he was leaving ,the man thanked Mandy for what she was doing/had done to help him.
I’m writing a song and I’m not a native speaker so I need your help. Is it correct to say, “Take my hand the world’s apart”?
Not certain what you��re trying to say but if my thoughts are yours, I’d would leave out “the”and put a comma after hand. My thought is this: even though we are worlds apart, either geographically, socially or culturally, take my hand…..it’s a romantic gesture.
How do native speakers truly feel when speaking with non-native English speakers?
What’s FineFirst off, it depends on the quality of the English of the Non-Native Speaker. I work with quite a number of people who were born outside of the United States in Non-English speaking countries. However, they speak English fluently now and I generally have no problem communicating with them. Some of these foreigners speak better English than many American-born people. (This is especially true because I work with a number of translators.)If someone is struggling to find one word, but speaks the rest of the sentence easily, then, again, I have no issue. Native speakers also lose track of words or might forget a word. There is no difference for me.If someone who speaks Broken English needs a simple piece of information, there is no problem. I can provide that and then let them go on their way.What’s IrksomeWhat irks me is if someone is trying to communicate with me, but doing so in such a slow way that by the time that they finish their sentence, five minutes has elapsed. I find it especially annoying if I speak that person’s native language and they simply keep trying to say whatever it is in Broken English in order to “practice speaking English”. If you would like to practice English, more power to you, but I am interested in communicating with you, so if we can more effectively communicate in your native tongue, let’s switch to that.Finally, it is very difficult to talk about an emotionally charged topic like a personal failure or a relationship break up when someone keeps asking you to define your terms and help them with pronunciation.
Is "would not better" grammatically correct? I am not a native English speaker. I have learned that we should use "would be better not".?
"Would be better not" is not a common expression but it can be used in sentences like "It would be better not to drink so much." I can't think of any way to use "would not better" and I do not believe that you can find a lot of sentences that contain it in the news (not "in news") or anywhere else. PS - I just saw your PS. "If you have to keep answering the telephone, you'll never get any work done, so you'd not better get the phone". is wrong. It should be "you'd better not get the phone." And "you'd" in this case is short for "you had" not "you would." ("You had better" is an idiom meaning "you should.")
Why is "everybody is" correct and not "everybody are"?
I'm not a native speaker of English, so I have hard time understanding why "Everybody is afraid of death" is correct, and not "Everybody are afraid of death". In my mind I ask "who are afraid of death?" and the answer is "they are" and not "they is". Can someone explain to me why the first is correct? Is the idea that you refer to the group? That cannot be right, since the group isn't an actual subject, and cannot be afraid of anything. Only the members of the group (they) can be afraid of death, or so it would seem. Isn't the phrase also synonymous with "all people are afraid of death?" I assume it isn't correct to say "All people is afraid of death?" (or is it?). I'm darkly suspicious that both common practice and grammar canon is simply in error, just like some people use double negation to express negation, only much more widespread :-(
How can I know whether or not I speak English like a native speaker?
For me, it often doesn't matter whether a person sounds like a native or not. Why? Because English in the UK is not the same as the USA and is not the same as Australia. Which sentence is "correct" or "more correct"?She went to hospital.She went to the hospital.If I hear the first, it sounds less natural to me. It is correct, but it says to me, "This person learned British English". The second says to me "This person learned USA English." There are a huge number of examples that could be used here to demonstrate this point. You may sound fluent to some people but not to others based on where you learned English.I've lived in several countries, and have had lots of experience with American, British, Irish and Australian English. I pick up bits and pieces of local phrasing, and integrate them unintentionally into my everyday speech. As a result, I have been mistaken as a non-native speaker. In other cases, I have had people who have been completely unable to place my "accent" because my cadence and choice of words is just slightly off the norms. The longer I am away, the harder it becomes. (I've found this to be true of other English speaking expats.)Do not worry about so much about the accent and fluency. Instead focus on clearly comunicating the thought you want to convey, and sharing as effectively as you can.
Is "native tongue" correct when referring to "native language"?
“Tongue” is also used to mean “language”, although it’s a somewhat old-fashioned usage. Just to give one example: the King James Version of the Bible, published in 1611 but used very widely by English-speaking Christians for centuries afterwards, mentions how Jesus’s disciples “began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” (Acts 2:4) It means that they were speaking different languages. Your “mother tongue��� or “native tongue” is the language you learned from your mother, as a child—although you might one day master a “foreign tongue”.Again, this is a bit old-fashioned, and I think most people in everyday speech would use “language”. But “tongue” can certainly mean either the muscular organ inside the mouth, or a spoken language.It’s the same in Russian—язык (yazyk) means both “thing in your mouth” and “language”. French langue and Spanish lengua, and their ancestral Latin lingua, also can mean either the part of your anatomy, or the language you speak. I assume this is true in other languages as well.