[astrange]

It's not hard to understand someone speaking poor English, and we're used to encountering ESL speakers. On the other hand, if I make a mistake in Japanese, especially when writing, nobody can understand me. It takes a lot of practice to get from being able to use a convenience store to having any kind of conversation.

Some of that is because they're not used to non-native speakers, but much of it is just the structure of the language and room for error-correction. I'd assume it's the same for Mandarin with so many short words and tones.

[westiseast]

I wouldn't really agree. Mark makes lots of grammar, vocab, pronunciation and tonal mistakes and the audience seems to understand him with no problems. Spoken Chinese isnt tgat hard and in some ways is much more forgiving than English for non native speakers.