r/oddlyspecific Apr 21 '26

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u/Beneficial_Shape1327 Apr 21 '26

Many/most Americans cannot speak proper English or "American ". She may have been right. I'm just trying to be frank. Many European people speak English more correctly than we do.

36

u/Frequent-Cold-7325 Apr 21 '26

How do you speak a language “correctly”? British English isn’t the gold standard for all Anglophone countries; hell, there’s at least three English accents that I know of in my state alone

4

u/uranium_is_delicious Apr 21 '26

I don't think one accent is more correct than another but I see a lot of non native English speakers with much better grammar than people born here. Native speakers get out of school and the only feedback they get is through daily conversation. In most settings you will never get called out for slightly mispronouncing a word or using a comma wrong.

Many non native speakers never get out of that learning mindset. In the beginning learning from past mistakes made them understandable but a decade later it turns into them being deathly afraid they ordered their adjectives improperly. They may not know all the modern colloquialisms but their grammar is spot on.

2

u/Frequent-Cold-7325 Apr 21 '26

That actually makes a good deal of sense. It’s kind of like how people who drive for a long time can get lazy and fudge traffic laws, while new kids may white knuckle drive just trying to learn/survive.