Life as a non-native speaker Writing in a foreign language is very taxing. You constantly need to strike a balance between what you want to say and what you can say without making mistakes. But maybe you don't care about making mistakes. What's wrong with mistakes? Our languages are redundant enough that we can understand each other even in presence of mistakes. Right that isn't, yeah? I mean, isn't that right? But then it comes a time when you need to actually talk to somebody and oops... you have no time to think and you realize that maybe, just maybe, you might need to relax your zero-mistake policy a little and cut yourself some slack. Ok, maybe you need to relax your policy more than a little, but at least you can get your meaning across, can't you? You wish. You're talking as if the only words you knew were "I", "can", "speak", "English"... "not". But after a while (read an eternity), things start to get better and you're pretty fond of yourself: you're speaking English! Hurray! You're feeling happy and full of yourself and then you come across that f****** dude on youtube who talks 100000 languages and you think WT*!