Icon: You hit the nail right on the head. That’s why when I speak with, or write to, my American friends, I don’t throw in a whole lot of Australian slang, and it’s why I don’t throw in the bizarre mix of rhyming slang and other allusions, peppered with random German words that my father speaks to me in but that probably my own cousins couldn’t understand. This “English is owned by everyone” nonsense drives me up the wall.
It’s also why the average European I meet seems to have a much better time in English than the average Taiwanese. I know a huge part of it is down to L1, but I think there’s a huge difference in attitude. The Germans I meet, aside from the occasional misuse of the present continuous, speak English ten times better than even the best Taiwanese. Yet they wouldn’t even begin to assume that they were on a par with a native speaker. I had a student (admittedly, quite good) at junior high school who thought that because her mother was an English teacher that she was where it was at and didn’t need to read any of my comments on her essays in a writing class. That class (the so-called “immersion” class) had quite a few students like her, yet interestingly, whenever they’d write their own scripts for performances, they came out as pure Chinglish.
To put the shoe on the other foot, I wonder what native Chinese speakers would think about a foreign professor of Chinese compared to say, your average native-speaking high school graduate.
