What an excellent post Razoo! I am in full agreement.

> 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."