Why You Can't Trust Native Speakers

As a person who speaks American variety of English natively, I can tell you innately that something sounds weird and I can guide in how to fix it, but if you asked grammar rules, I wouldn't really know how to explain them. However, for Spanish, I've been learning as an adult and have been exposed to the grammar rules, I would have a better chance in explaining it due to paying more attention.

You're right, I do tend to hear a lot of "No one says ___ anymore", only for someone to come in and counter "What are you talking about? I say it all the time." The simple truth is, a lot of vocabulary is 'region locked' to an extent. You can't simply say "It's 'soda', nobody says 'pop' anymore!" when some regions of the US absolutely do, in fact, still call it pop. And even within your own region there is bound to be vocabulary other people use that you don't, since socio-economic standing, age group, ethnicity, and even just more localized regions (towns, even individual neighborhoods) can have differences in vocabulary. I can tell you that almost nobody at all calls a hotdog a "glizzy" in my specific area, but that doesn't mean nobody says it at all. It'll be a cold day in hell before I use that word unironically, tho.

My German teacher was hungarian and she was awesome. She had been Certified to evaluate c1 students. And i always thought she understood my stuggles better than German teachers and she was able to give better feedback on how to Improve.

I've had a Chinese dude arguing with me on the HiNative app (I'm a native English speaker from England) that the word 'rubbish' is archaic and no one uses it because an American told him so.

if someone whose first language isn't english says "could of" they've been taught by someone whose first language is english

I don't know why, but the only times I've been repeatedly told how I apparently mispronounce the words of my native language by someone who didn't know anything about my language, it was by an American who had some Italian ancestor. My current strategy is answering in Italian and when they say that they don't understand what I'm saying, telling them a giant "I rest my case". It still doesn't work.

So, I'm a non native english speaker and I went to some language courses abroad to improve my english. Last year for example I went to Malta and let me tell you, I witnessed every flaw of having an untrained native speaker as your teacher. She was a barrister by profession and she came to Malta from the UK. To start with: she called general american accent "netflix english" and hated on it every single time. She tried to push her accent on us (london middle class I belive) as the only right pronunciation and talked about american tv having bad influence on people's accent. Not only that, she hated whenever someone was using any word used in american english. She would count writing color instead of colour as a mistake and stuff like that. She looked like she was going to explode when my friend called her an attorney instead of a barrister. She had troubles explaining grammar to us, because no one taught her how to. I don't hate on her as a person, but I do think her lack of education made her a mediocre teacher. I consider the time I've spent in her classroom to be more of a waste

As a History and English teacher of thirty years' standing, I can only echo the truth of Raff's comments here. Having an understanding of a subject is one thing; having the patience and insight to be able to teach it to others is very much a different thing altogether. And even those skills are far more of an art, than a science.

Some Italian-Americans think they are more Italian than real Italians.

As a linguist who works among a minority language in Papua New Guinea, you are correct. Just being a native speaker is not enough. I've spent years essentially teaching them how to teach me their language. It is slow. However, a good teacher and more importantly good materials makes it much easier and quicker. It's just most people don't realize how much of their language learning was done ahead of time in preparation to pave the way for their learning.

I am German and had 3 years of Latin in school and nothing tought me German grammar better. We were 3 latin students in our class and we were the only 3 who understood our German grammar lessons easily and would help the other students together with our German teacher. :D

My native Dutch teacher refused to deviate from her boring PowerPoint presentation. She had zero empathy and was only teaching (monologuing) for the money. Needless to say , she found this polyglot to be her worst student. We parted ways fairly quickly. A year later I bumped into her at the supermarket and she was astonished that I spoke it fluently by then.

Native speakers tend to make different kinds of errors. For them it is much harder to distinguish between similar sounding words. Example: 'two', 'too' and 'to'. For me as a Dutch guy, I immediately know which one of these I should write, because each of them translate to a different word in my language (twee, naar & ook). Same for 'there', 'their' and 'they're'. Even 'our' and 'are' sound similar in English.

This rings true for me, I understand Japanese, and the person who taught me all the written characters is American, the person who's grammar guide I used is Korean, the person who I learned the methods for acquiring the vocab and listening ability and general fluency is Kenyan, and he largely based his Japanese learning methods on some Polish guys who wrote a guide on learning English. I learned from Japanese native speakers as in I watched media created by them like shows and movies and books and stuff but all the "how to learn the Japanese language" type materials I used were from foreigners

My prof at the university used to say that non-native teachers are the best because they had to learn the language their self, especially they had to figure out those illogicalities and irregularities every language has that natives give for granted.

“No matter what they teach in schools, Sicilians were black and never said amuninni, because my grandma told me so” - American proverb.

I'm a Brazilian English teacher who was raised bilingual in Portuguese and English. But even that did not automatically make me a good teacher. I still had to learn teaching as a skillset. And even to this day I still find myself in situations where I don't really know how to explain why some things in English are the way they are. 😅

I had several different Spanish teachers in my years taking classes through all levels of schooling, and hands-down the single best Spanish teacher I had was not a native speaker. That’s not to say that I didn’t have some good teachers that were native speakers, but this teacher was by far the best at the skill of teaching. I also do think there’s some value in being a language teacher as a non-native speaker, because you understand what it’s like to have had to learn the language as a student yourself, rather than having learned it natively. Again, that doesn’t mean all non-native speaking teachers are the best, but I think it is one positive aspect that a non-native speaking teacher can offer, provided that they are also a good teacher with sufficient knowledge of the language.

1:22 As a native English speaker who has taught English in France for 20 years, I completely agree. It's not enough to be a native speaker; you have to know how to teach your language. Being able to explain the ins and outs of your native tongue is a skill many teachers of English lack. I'm fortunate enough to be a language nerd and a grammar freak that I am able to explain how English works. Another important factor is you have to enjoy teaching to be effective. A lot of English speakers see teaching as a job and not a career.

This is a very good point. Knowing one's own language doesn't necessarily mean you know how to teach said language to someone else. I'm a non-native German teacher. I learned the language while living in Germany and at the same time attending courses held by professional teachers who specialized in specifically teaching adult immigrants. These teachers inspired me to become a teacher myself and indirectly taught me a lot of techniques that I would later make use of as I started a teacher's education back home, a few years later. I think my experience of having learned the language from scratch, from skilled language teachers, made me able to become a better teacher myself. It gave me a different perspective of learning a language, I think, which has helped me professionally ever since. One of the classes I took over had even been taught by a (non-educated) native speaker before, and the students actually mentioned that they started learning a lot more from my methods, as compared to their previous teacher. Obviously, a native speaker's knowledge can also be invaluable, and as you say, having both skill sets/experiences available in a classroom is likely the optimal situation for students. Not necessarily a bilingual teacher, but you want the actual real-life experience of growing up speaking the target language, but also the technical education that comes from a teacher's program at university, and the personal experience of having learned a new language from the ground up as well. Either way, simply being a native speaker means very little without context.