Sanja wrote,
"Native English speakers don't always know the best. Sometimes (actually pretty often) non-native speakers have better language skills."

Sanja, over the past three years that I've taught English in Asia (Korea and Taiwan), I've gotten the impression that a lot of English students in Asia agree with you.

A few examples:

One of my students, a Korean businessman, told me after a few sojus, "I may know English grammar better than you do." A lot of Koreans of his generation studied English grammar in middle and high school and at the university, so I could see how he could make such a generalization, especially after a few sojus. However, I also studied English grammar in middle school and high school (I'm an old guy, and they still taught grammar in American schools 'way back when). I also studied it in my freshman year at the university. By my junior year, I was an English major, so I took an "advanced grammar course," in which they had us diagramming sentences and using a textbook which had first been published in the 1930s. I forget the name of the book, but I called it "The Blue Nazi" because of its plain, blue cover and because of its rigor. In its youth, my university had been a teacher's college, so its English department focused on grammar. In the graduate school of that university, we took a course called "Grammar for Teachers." I guess this was just in case "The Blue Nazi" wasn't enough. Then, I was hired as a proofreading assistant by the Graduate College. For several semesters, I proofread the submitted theses and dissertations. I didn't write proofreader's marks on the theses themselves; the Dean made me write corrections and explanations on a separate form, citing the page, paragraph, and line number of the mistake. In that gig, I resorted to and often cited the Harbrace (an American grammar and writing manual), the American Psychological Association's style manual (for social sciences theses), the American Chemical Society's style manual (for chemistry theses and pharmacy dissertations), the Chicago Manual of Style, and maybe some others (I forget). But for grammar, I mainly used and cited the Harbrace. I was also a teaching assistant for three semesters. And after I got my Master's, I came back and taught a couple more semesters. So, while anything is possible, I think that my Korean student's assertion was mistaken.

Here in Taiwan, during the SARS epidemic, one of my Taiwanese colleagues asked me whether the face masks that people were wearing for protection should be called masks or muzzles. I replied slowly and in a loud, clear voice, "'Muzzle' is for dogs." She responded, "I think it should be 'muzzle.'" I smiled and let it go at that. (Why make trouble?)

Once I was listening to a tape that accompanied an English textbook published here in Taiwan. A new foreign teacher was with me. The voice on the tape was that of a native speaker, and she occasionally used English of a kind that a native speaker wouldn't use. The new teacher asked me why, and I told him, "Because she's reading what's written in the script." He then asked me why the native speaker didn't correct what was in the script, and I replied, "Because she wants the job and doesn't want to get in trouble with her boss."

My former boss here in Taiwan wanted me to write a mock political debate for the kids to do at the Christmas program. The debate was between fictional mayoral candidates. In the text of the debate, I used the word "improvements," a term often used to mean fixing up streets, sewage lines, etc. My boss read the draft of the debate and asked me, "Isn't 'improvements' an uncountable noun?" I replied that I supposed that it usually is, but not in this case. A few days later at a teacher's meeting, she told the faculty that she had looked the word up in an EFL book, and I was wrong. Later, I showed her examples of "improvements" in the big Webster's unabridged dictionary that's available online, and she very reluctantly retreated from her earlier position. She didn't mention her new opinion at the next teacher's meeting, though :-)

At that same school, I was teaching a class of ten-year-olds, and I happened to use the word "cook" in a sentence as a noun, denoting a person who cooks. One of the students said something to the Chinese teacher in Chinese. She told me that he didn't understand how I could use "cook" that way, that it should be "cooker." I explained that I knew that it seemed odd, that English was a funny language, etc. But he wasn't convinced. And not only was he unconvinced, but the Chinese teacher was very skeptical as well. She looked at me very seriously and asked, "Are you sure?" I then left the class, got a dictionary, brought it back in, and showed the teacher the entry "cook." That settled the matter (I guess).

I can't cite too many other examples because I'm old and, fortunately for me in this case, my memory is starting to fail. But it's happened a lot. Many of the students I've had in Asia have exhibited a belief that they know English better than I do. I've come to accept that now.

Who knows, maybe some of them do know English better than I do. I'm beginning to wonder whether it matters. As an international language, English may be on its way to a destination I can't even imagine. Anyway, maybe Hamlet was right in saying, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."