[fennecbutt]

Huge difference is: English is pretty much THE language that you can butcher and still have people perfectly understand (and hopefully politely correct) you. Even other European (stay mad) languages don't hold up to just how flexible English is in this regard.

[Tor3]

Well yes, that's (I believe) the reason English actually works as an international language, despite being horrible in so many respects (pronunciation, tons of exceptions, etc etc): It also has so much redundancy that even if you get all the grammar wrong the meaning is still there. "I is strongs". When someone knows a tiny bit of English it's often easier to communicate in English than in that person's language, even if you're studying said language. Unfortunately, kind of, but that's how it is.

[fennecbutt]

Yeah exactly. "Me arms big power" would make me go "Oh yeah you do have mighty biceps my dude".

And to the latter point I got that all the time in Japan, but I think main reasons are: they wanna practice, but even more they wanna practice with a native English speaker bc it's a novel experience for em!