[thaumasiotes]

> It means we can express concepts in English with structures and flows that, if grammatically correct, have the advantage of sounding original, different, sometimes exotic.

Yeah, that happens all the time. It always strikes me as unfair when someone comes out with an ostensibly perfect sentence and the result is "well, you didn't make any mistakes; all the words mean what you want them to mean and all the grammar is used correctly. But the sentence is still wrong; that's just not how we say that."

[Al-Khwarizmi]

It's useful to learn how they say it, though. Not because we should pretend to be native speakers when we aren't, but because language is more efficient if you know the expected way to use it.

The correct but awkward sentences from non-natives (I also use them, being a non-native English speaker) will more easily get lost in situations with background noise, several people talking, people not paying a lot of attention, etc. because not saying things they way people expect and are used to implies extra effort to understand.

[camillomiller]

True, but OP was asking for an AI tool to help in this. I think the language bias on such a tool would be enormous, and it would contribute to flatten a piece of writing. Being effective by saying things the right way, or picking the right words to express a specific context, is definitely important. My point was this: once you get to a good-enough point, what you're looking for is an editor (of sorts, not necessarily a professional one). Someone that could recognize how your idiomatic choice of words serves the piece right, or makes it harder to understand. What really helped me was asking native friends to read my posts or my articles, and tell me what they were getting from them. After a while, through this process, you'll get better yourself at recognizing these patterns. Before that, I worked hard on understanding the specific pitfalls of writing in English as a native Italian. One clear example: attributive nouns.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> One clear example: attributive nouns.

Specific examples, please? I'm curious :)

[camillomiller]

In a case where a noun is a modifier of the following word, Italians tend to prefer specificity , therefore falling for the “noun + of…” construct. A chicken soup bowl is easy to understand, but for an Italian that’s a “piatto di brodo di pollo”, so an Italian native would tend to feel like “a bowl of chicken soup” is the better choice. In this case there’s no real mistake (and for “bowl of” you might argue there’s almost no meaning difference) but most of the time you end up with convoluted sentences, especially if a genitive is lurking around —- “Andy’s chicken soup bowl” vs “the bowl of chicken soup of Andy”. Understandable, more familiar to an Italian speaker, yet kind of wrong.

[thaumasiotes]

Just for reference, the default English constructions would be "bowl of chicken soup" and "Andy's bowl of chicken soup".

"Bowl of soup of chicken" is right out, but "chicken soup bowl" isn't much better. It's so anomalous that I might interpret it as meaning "a bowl for chicken soup" as opposed to "a bowl with chicken soup in it right now".

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Thanks for the example!

Wouldn't "piatto di brodo di pollo" translate to "a bowl of soup of chicken", as a more unnatural English sentence?

Greek is similar in that respect and I catch myself sometimes lapsing into such more micro-managed speaking, and I also noticed it in other Greeks (perhaps a few Italians also).

[willyt]

I’m a native English speaker and you all write well enough in English that I didn’t notice that you are not native speakers from your writing. I went back and looked more carefully and noticed a few little mistakes, but nothing I wouldn’t write off as the result of someone writing quickly.