TalonAlright, listen up. I see a lot of discussion getting way too heated because you've got people with perfect English on one side, and people just struggling to get themselves understood in a language they don't speak well on the other, and then both sides just don't get what the other is saying and then things explode. I've seen this so, so many times. And honestly all this tells me is that it's really, really easy for English speaking people to think that since we have a lot of good English speakers on the internet, or that that is the bubble they always find themselves in, that everybody does. And this is so very much not the case and y'all should be careful. You're making enemies you don't necessarily have to make just because you don't consider that the person on the other side can't express themselves clearly and is just doing the best they can.
English is really difficult. I get words wrong all the time. I don't know what different common phrases mean sometimes. Sometimes I'll say something weird and I thought it meant one thing when it meant another. English is *not* my first language. I'd consider myself to be relatively good at expressing myself in it, but I'm not perfect. Far from it. Add to this that some people just struggle expressing themselves in general. It's really hard to tell just how well someone speaks the language just by reading some text, because we potentially have a lot of time to think things through before we post, or even paste it into a grammar and spell checker before we do.
But grammar checkers don't help us when we get an idiom wrong. And yes I had to look up how to spell idiom, too.
Marie Elizabeth Bayar@talon English is one of the hardest languages to learn. Even though I learned English and my mother tongue at the same time, I find that sometimes I have trouble myself. Some things just sound weird to me. You do really well though. I applaud you.