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I can really appreciate your point "When you're an adult, nobody corrects your grammar once it's good enough to be understood." It's true. I speak near-fluent Russian as a second language, but it's hard for me to get better because people are too polite to correct my mistakes. If my idea clear, people don't want to appear impolite.

I can't be too critical: I do the same thing when people speak broken English to me. If the idea they want to express is clear, it seems improper to correct them.

>If my idea clear, //

Did you do that on purpose? "[M]y idea is clear" is better, but still not great, not UK native at least. But then you said "if the idea they want to express is clear" later, which is perfect; so just switch "they" <-> "I" and you have a better phrase.

Maybe it was a typo?

Yeah, it was a typo on my part. I wanted to say something like, "If my idea was clear..."

May I ask from where in Siberia you're from (reading between the lines of your username). I studied for some time in Novosibirsk, absolutely loved it :)

I chuckled at that one, because that is the most common mistake I used to make when I was learning English, because Russian doesn't have articles

My rule of thumb: if I hear a mistake once, I let it pass (maybe it was just a one-off mistake instead of a misconception). If it hear it twice, I offer the correction kindly. All such interactions have been met with gratitude.

This is such a good rule. The biggest things I learned from this thread:

- Stop worrying about how I sound to other people, make as many mistakes as possible to receive feedback

- Stop being over-polite by not correcting others, this is how they get their feedback

> My teacher is very particular about the exact shape your mouth and tongue should be making. She's the first language teacher I've had who's done that.

Isn't that mainly because you're learning Mandarin where tone actually matters? In English you can pronounce can ad anything between "can" "ken" "keen" and a few others depending where you're from. I don't believe that's still valid in Chinese.

This is technically true but in real life people mispronounce tones all the time and get understood fine. Mandarin songs have no tonal distinctions at all and nobody has problems understanding them. Getting tone right is super important if you want to be extremely terse (as is traditional) but you can get away with a lot of tone mistakes if you add context. (I'm also learning Mandarin at the moment, as my fifth language)

The shape of your mouth and tongue position isn't really about tones. It's more that Mandarin has a bunch of sounds that aren't used in English. It's difficult to even hear them at first. For example, x versus sh, j versus zh, or ü versus u.

You are describing different vowels and not tones. Different vowels are pronounced by changing the shape of the mouth; tones are produced by the laryngeal muscles, like when you hum a tune.

That's cool, thanks. I learned something.

> They're pretty good at it

One is, and became so with surprising speed back when (but - nitpick - is no longer a princess). Another really isn't, not in any deep and idiomatic way, considering years spent and ressources at her disposal. But then, her very much native born husbond prince can barely master a full coherent sentence in his mother tongue.

Actually, few non-natives ever become truly fluent in spoken Danish. It is not so much a weird language as it is a mumbled one - to the extent that many Danes, especially the younger generations, have real trouble with written language, always confusing conjugations which ought to sound different but in contemporary speech don't. Compare Norwegian and Swedish, languages very closely related to Danish, but with far clearer speech habits.

> But then, her very much native born husbond prince can barely master a full coherent sentence in his mother tongue.

Aren't they both fluent in Danish and French?

> Actually, few non-natives ever become truly fluent in spoken Danish

I don't know, I suspect this is because there's so many weird sounds that aren't really explained in a course. I find if you look up a linguistic explanation of the language you see a lot of things that a language teacher wouldn't give you. But of course that's not the same as practicing.

I heard a Russian diplomat speak Swedish once. It was both flattering and a little scary. Pitch perfect.

Maybe it should be scary. From the anecdotes I heard KGB had very good language schools. I have no idea how credible that is.

> They have an accent as well. I guess that's because at some point people stop being corrected on the exact sound they are making.

> Likewise with other language learning issues. When you're an adult, nobody corrects your grammar once it's good enough to be understood.

While it is true that nobody corrects adults, nobody corrects children either. Children just put in a lot more practice than most adults.

It's not really true that nobody corrects children though.

"I wanna banama." "Oh, you want a banana? Here you go..."

This kind of interaction is very typical of parents speaking to their children, and it is immensely helpful in language learning. Overdoing correction, as offered in a classroom, on the other hand, is not helpful:

"I go to cinema tomorrow." "No, I'm afraid you can't say 'to cinema' like that. Please open your grammar textbook and let us revisit the rule for article usage again..."