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Comment by shrikant | Hacker News Reader

> The only option I could think of is living in an English speaking country, but that currently not an option.

Speaking from personal experience, I think all this will do is change your speech patterns and modulate your accent ever so slightly.

You likely read/write English better than a native English speaker already. Some of the language/grammar I've encountered from my English colleagues in both formal and informal written communication is absolutely terrible, and I attribute that to them "learning" English by way of speaking and "incorrect" colloquial usage before perfunctorily running through their English lessons at school.

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> You likely read/write English better than a native English speaker already.

Kinda by definition this can't be correct. English is defined by what the native speakers speak. It might be that sometimes how they say things doesn't match up to how you were taught was correct, but it is likely to be correct for their dialect.

Just because a native speaker might have written OP's bit above as "[...] that a native speaker would of said it differently." doesn't make it correct for "their" dialect.

>> English is defined by what the native speakers speak.

What about regional accents? For a non native speaker of English, understanding English as spoken in Scotland is a challenge. And I heard people born in UK complaining they had sometimes difficulties with American English (for example with real life/social things). This without speaking of people from India who speak an English which is slightly different from US' or UK's English (and equally valuable and "native").

So I guess a definition of "native speaker" is a bit difficult.

>understanding English as spoken in Scotland is a challenge.

Interesting tangent that I somewhat recently was made aware of; some of what they speak maybe isn't English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language

After I learned German for a few years, I lived in a region of Germany where many people spoke in a dialect. At the time I thought I had a pretty good handle on what was dialect and what wasn't. A good amount of dialect made it into my speech anyway, since that's how the locals spoke.

Later I discovered to my surprise that a few of the words I had placed in the "standard German" category were actually from the regional dialect.

I actually think it was more helpful to my language abilities to have learned two different German dialects (one of which was standard German). It also helped me to understand how languages change and what it must have been like several centuries ago when there wasn't a standardized German and people had to struggle to understand someone from far away area that in theory spoke the same language.

I imagine there is some blurring between what's an accent and what's a dialect, especially with your Scotland example. And to break it down further, as a native English speaker I can understand people in Edinburgh just fine, but Glaswegians are a mystery to me.

Your own native language probably has similar things - I know with Dutch, someone from one region can struggle to understand people from another region if they're speaking in their own dialect.

Written English—especially the formal register—is a different language than the spoken English of a native speaker.

GP was talking about reading and writing, but you're talking about speaking, for some reason.

OP may very well have better-than-average spelling. To quote Harvey Pekar, "average is dumb!".

https://66.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5ixdsF2111qz6f4bo1_400.j...

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