Listened to any native English speakers lately? At least in the US, the native speakers mangle the language to a horrible extent.
Most foreigners with decent English are actually much better at "English" than most Americans.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26607520.
That's literally impossible. Please don't confuse your classism for linguistics.
Because it's not only about classisism it's about not giving a f!
A non-native can communicate better than a native in several occasions.
Yes grammar deviations from the norm "are right" if they are productive and if they are understood in a collective manner.
This is different from someone who speaks with an ininteligible pronunciation
of a distinction that exists in only the formal written register of less than a handful of English prestige dialects.
It is not wrong to say "Who did you learn this nonsense from?" It is just not formal written Standard American English.
Your insistence that one native speaker's dialect is somehow "more right" than another's is not a measure of someone's linguistic competence, it's a social value judgment with classist and racist overtones. Maybe if you spent some time studying AAVE (African American Vernacular English) and other dialects, you wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it as "ebonics."
English has prestige dialects which conserve certain features, and others which are low status and don't. A phrase like "I done been doin it!" is grammatically regular, in a dialect of the language which you don't speak; it isn't the same thing as the mistakes a non-native speaker will make, at all, and you shouldn't treat it like it is.
I would agree with you in full in certain edge cases (such as Vladimir Nabokov’s mastery of English which absolutely eclipses 99.9999% of native English speakers) but to suggest that most are better is a bit rich.
Average native speakers may be unaware of named grammatical concepts, such as tag questions or contrary to fact conditional statements, but they certainly understand how to use them.
Where you begin to see the gulf between native speakers and ESL people is in their swiftness in things like satire, asking questions which nudge conversation, effortlessly using articles correctly, communicating abstraction, making long sentences with numerous prepositional phrases which all use the right preposition. There are many tells.
A great number of people absolutely reach the level of being truly bilingual and integrated into the culture but it’s uncommon at least to become better than most native speakers.