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> For most people it's their 3rd or 4th or 5th language, and they were always so full of joy and happiness than I was trying my best.

I think this is currently pretty typical in any language.

In my experience, Non-native speakers are much more resilient to strong accents and broken grammar. Probably because they passed themselves by this step.

I worked in a research laboratory with >100 nationalities: It was extremely common to be at a table with a Greek, a Spanish and a Chinese perfectly understanding each other in some "Globish English" while the British or Australian next chair were crying in tears.

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I was (at one point) fairly conversational in French by US standards (was taking 300 level French conversation classes).

Did a fairly long trip in France, using as much French as I could. The speed of native French speakers meant comprehension was hard but manageable, and they seemed (almost intentionally at times), unable to make anything but what I would consider "travel French" work. I was fairly discouraged. I then met an Italian ski instructor who worked in France, and I could understand him quite well, and talked with him at a level (job, hobbies, family, reasons for travel) that I never achieved with a native speaker.

It was one of the most memorable moments of the trip and really gave me a feeling that we're all "citizens of the world" and not quite so divided by culture and lines on a map.

Yea it’s very rare to find a French person who will slow down or repeat things to help you understand.

I am French, the oral French is very different from what is taught in books. There are a lot of transformations like 'je' to 'che' or 'il' to 'i' (from a French perspective). Also, many liaisons between words are pronounced but others are not, sometimes astonishingly to me, a guy born a long time ago in Brittany.

And young people learn to speak very quickly when they go to primary school (I don't know why).

Also there are lots of invented words by each generation like "wish" that you are ignorant if are not 10 years old.

One of the hardest things tobadapt to: following conversation and discussions in French. In the beginning, I always was at least five sentences behind with my comprehension of what was said...

I think that is common in Catalan, too. But, curiously, not so much with Castilian Spanish: almost every word I can think of is pronounced just like it is written, if you do it properly.

In Germany they were happy to see me trying, but almost universally couldn't understand any of my garbled sentences. I put it down to German being one of those languages where the order of words matters less and conjugation matters more for inferring context (and context is key to making any sense). Because I mis-conjugated a lot, it came across as garbled nonsense.

I've travelled a bit, and learning to speak Global English is definitely a skill. My German wife is more understandable to the average SE Asian than I am, despite me being a native speaker. She uses less $5 words, and simpler sentence construction than I do. It's interesting (and a little galling) seeing my perfectly-constructed sentence fail to make any headway, while her simple English is immediately understood.

And yes, at times I've definitely reacted with "I understood that, but holy crap that was bad English". Whatever works I guess.

Haha, it's funny we have had similar experiences. But I have been the German in this situation. We had some designers from the UK and often out team members were struggling to understand them, and I had to reiterate their sentences in other terms, sometimes in bad English but that everyone understood. (A large part is also the British accent)

The fun thing about those experiences in professional settings is that the non-native speakers struggling with $5 words will liberally use $10 words ($50 words? I don't know how this is deals with inflation) that are part of the specific domain.

And trying to communicate clearly English to someone considerably more fluent in a Latin-derived language can even be an exercise in picking $10 and $50 words over the standard $5 ones because so much of our fancy vocabulary has common Latin roots

Opposite in my experience... English is my second language, I'm pretty fluent but I just can't understand strong accents.

I quit freelancing for a startup once because I missed half of their French English on meetings. Nowadays we have meetings with Mandarin Chinese and French and while a few of them have good English when others talk I give up.

Meanwhile with the same people native speakers from US and UK have no issues. I am amazed at how they can parse any gibberish thrown at them.

I have the same experience. For some reason, native English speakers struggle more.

Americans seem to struggle more than Brits. Perhaps it's because people in the UK are more used to strong Brittish accents and foreigners

> Non-native speakers are much more resilient to strong accents and broken grammar. Probably because they passed themselves by this step

You just don't feel foreign language the way you feel own. Swearing in foreign language is just a word woth another meaning.

Not being bothered by bad grammar and what not is the same - butchered foreign language is not annoying nor more effort to understand. Butchered own language hurts ears the way foreign one does not.

> Swearing in foreign language is just a word woth another meaning.

I don't think so. Swear word is a swear word. It feels just as taboo to me.

That’s just partly true. While non-native speakers obviously recognize that something is a swear word, without immersion it’s often hard to gauge how it will be perceived by native speakers, simply because you don’t meet many, or any, to get reactions from.

I’m a non native speaker and it wasn’t until University when I met actual Americans that I realized my swearing could be ear-curling from time to time — I simply hadn’t noticed the reaction I got before in my life.

A simple example is the Swedish word “skit” and the English “shit”. In Swedish it’s actually pretty benign, for different reasons it’s not at all at the top of our swearing hierarchy: if you’d use “shit” in English in the same situations as you’d use “skit” in Swedish, English people will react.

So both in cases where there are cognates and a lack of actual experience with native speakers, there’s definitely a disconnect. I think any native speakers who have met good non native speakers have experienced this, they have 80-90% down but lack the cultural context (because where would it come from, movies isn’t enough)

As a Norwegian, we also have swear words that are not that bad. The problem is that the closest translation is often "fuck". So if you meet a Norwegian, don't be surprised if they drop the f-bomb frequently in business meetings. Many are not aware of the social context.

UK has git, sod, bastard, shit, tosser etc. Which you would use at work depends on work culture of course.

For me, it is not so much that I am not aware. I am aware.

But, when you swear in my language, I am bothered by it. It feels rude. Swearing in foreign language does not bother me at all. It does not feel rude.

>"Globish English"

Yes yes. I English speak very easy. I English hear too very easy. Easy understand. Can talk each other good just simple words. English very good.

*Ahem*

Basically, the built-in error correction functionality in English is bloody phenomenal. Literally anyone with a passing understanding and skill in English can use it to communicate effectively. This feature is seldom seen in most other languages let alone lingua francas.

> This feature is seldom seen in most other languages let alone lingua francas.

Source? On it's face this doesn't sound plausible...

Yeah this could just be a property of most human languages.

Source? How does it not sound plausible?

It sounds like someone who’s never learnt any other language and is high on freedom propaganda. It’s more than not plausible, it’s laughable.

You are are literally describing a "lingua franca" here.

And there's no evidence that English is special in it's ability serve as a lingua franca. In previous eras, other languages held this role (e.g, French, hence the term "lingua franca").

The dominance of English can be far more certainly attributed to the geopolitical dominance of english-speaking nations...

Agree with your main point, but Lingua Franca doesn't refer to French but to "Mediterranean Lingua Franca", an actual trade language of its own which was a mix of a bunch of things. It had that name because it was "the language of the Frankish" (traders) but what they (eastern sea/Muslim traders) meant by "Franks" was any western European.

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

What evidence are you looking for? No despot on Earth has managed to stamp it out, unlike countless other languages. You can say things like lingua franca and everyone knows what you’re talking about. There aren’t any pronouns that depend on social status. It’s got a phonetic alphabet. It’s just a natural choice for commerce and knowledge-sharing.

Evidence? I was the one asking for evidence. I question the (very dubious) claim in the post I was responding to, that English is inherently suited to a role as a lingua franca.

Also, separately, your counterclaims are kind of... untrue? None of them are true of (e.g.) Mandarin which definitely served as a lingua franca for the ancient far east.

You need to provide evidence that “built-in error correction functionality in English is bloody phenomenal” compared to other languages, because you can communicate with simple words and broken grammar just fine in every language I know.

> Yes yes. I English speak very easy. I English hear too very easy. Easy understand. Can talk each other good just simple words. English very good.

Pretty easy to “translate” that to a broken yet still understandable version of other languages.

> No despot on Earth has managed to stamp it out, unlike countless other languages.

Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot?

> You can say things like lingua franca and everyone knows what you’re talking about.

Considering that the phrase is Latin, I am not sure what your point is.

> There aren’t any pronouns that depend on social status.

And many other quirks that are as alien to a native Japanese speaker than this is to you, however.

> It’s got a phonetic alphabet

What? Are we still talking about English here? FFS.

> It’s just a natural choice for commerce and knowledge-sharing.

It’s really not. Like all languages that ended up in similar situation (e.g. French, Arabic, Mandarin, or Latin), it is a combination of good old fashioned imperialism and commercial links.

> Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot?

Many languages have been wiped out by genocides, and wiping out a language is a common explicit tactic in ethnic cleansings.

English has never been the source of a serious campaign of this regard, though.

Quite the opposite, English has been the source of many such pressures, e.g. post Norman invasion, but it simply adapted in borg-like fashion to redefine what English was; retaining some of the previous language and moulding itself to fit in some of the new language.

Rather than rigidly fight against new influence, it took new words while retaining some of it's own. It does this constantly.

Even Chaucer's English is difficult to decipher for a modern English speaker, and that isn't even that old.

> Quite the opposite, English has been the source of many such pressures, e.g. post Norman invasion, but it simply adapted in borg-like fashion to redefine what English was

What you are describing is the standard process by which languages change. It's not accurate to equate this with the systematic elimination of a linguistic group through ethnic cleansing, something which English has never experienced.

> Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot?

Brazil had a couple of instances of that. In the 18th century, the Marquis of Pombal implemented a program to extinguish usage of Tupi as the national language and replace it with Portuguese. That was successful. And then a second iteration when the Italian, German and Japanese communities of speakers in South Brazil were prevented from speaking their languages around the time of World War 2. This was successful too.

Police document declaring it illegal to speak German, Italian and Japanese in public:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brazil_-_Proibido_falar_a...

> Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot?

Oh the irony!

The English tried to wipe out Gaelic use in Cornwall, Scotland, the Isle of Man and Ireland for centuries. Schools were told to punish children for speaking Gaelic, and to only speak English to their students. We succeeded in wiping out Cornish as a living language (sorry!). Manx and Irish Gaelic survived, though you can argue about Manx Gaelic (there was a revival around the time the last native speaker died).

I'll take a guess. It's been a while since I've looked for ally at another language. But English has fewer cases of verbs, and a more rigid sentence structure.

We have more special cases of past tense verbs and weird pronunciation, but I think it's easier to duck up and still make sense in English? Maybe.

English famously has relatively complex verb conjugation. What we don't have are cases (only a few words decline). German has cases for example, but much simpler verb conjugation.

By complex, I assume you mean highly irregular?

I think I was being vague in my terminology. I wanted to say more broadly that German verbs are generally simpler than English ones because there are fewer tenses and aspects. There are however a greater number of strong verbs in German than in English.

I'm not familiar enough with German to evaluate. But when I think of Spanish, you've got 6 conjugations for every tense, and a whole bunch of different tenses. That makes for many dozens of different inflections, just for verbs.

English, by contrast, only has 8 regular inflections, across all parts of speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection#Examples_in_English

English does have a rich ecosystem of compound verbs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_verb), but if this is taken to be part of the complexity of English verbs, I don't know how this stacks up to other languages.

many languages have this feature. For example Russian or German. You can put in the words, with most words missing, in any order and somehow someone will get it. France cant do this. Why... I dont know why. Maybe because the are more desciptive.

> France cant do this. Why... I dont know why. Maybe because the are more desciptive.

I would bet that a part of it can probably be blamed more on Parisian being Parisian than on the French themselves :)

> France cant do this. Why... I dont know why. Maybe because the are more desciptive.

Oui oui. Je français parle très bien. Je entends français très bien aussi. Facile comprendre. Peux parler entre nous très bien juste mots simples. Français très bon.

Is just as understandable as the English original. French is much more forgiving than German in that regard, with a more flexible sentence structure. German and Russian the advantage of declension, which is a redundancy mechanism to indicate the role of a noun, but it’s an advantage over English just as much as over French. Also, it’s something a non-native will get wrong most of the time initially, so it’s not really helpful to help understand broken German.

Basically, I don’t think this is right and I tend to agree to “ many languages have this feature”, although I would say “most”.

Declention makes it harder to learn the language tho. Keeping fixed words order is waaaay easier then keeping all those suffixes correct.

I agree French could do this as well as English.

In fact, many Creole language derived from French have this kind of simplified French structure as a core feature

Russian is a heavily inflected language, so the order of words matters less. For example, in English you can say "the cat ate the bird", but if you reversed "cat" and "bird" this would be a different sentence entirely. In Russian "cat" would have the nominative case and "bird" accusative, so you can swap the words around and it would mean the same, though perhaps with different emphasis.

French doesn't do this; as with English only the pronouns have vestigial accusative, and in any case most inflections are lost in speech because French drops consonants from the end of words. So you have to depend on strict word order to preserve meaning.

English is mostly unique in its vocabulary size. We have redundant words for nearly every concept. We often shift registers by using different vocab--Latin-origin words for more formal/respectable registers. The ability to speak it in broken fashion and be understood is not unique.

English actually has terrible "error correction" on account of extensively using word order to indicate grammatical constructs, rather than inflection. You move the order of words around and it gets an entirely different meaning.

Plus its orthography is ridiculously inconsistent, and a learner is never sure if they've got the right pronunciation when looking at a word because it's been caked over with N layers of different systems (Anglo-Saxon + Norse + Norman French + Latin + Greek etc)

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