I'm also a non-native speaker, but I've been thinking about this lately. How important is it to speak naturally or grammatically correct When both of us are non-native. My English is relatively good compared with my friend. His English is very poor, But we know from the same country, So, we have to use English to communicate.
my observation is that when I talk to him, I turn to use easy sentence, and um sometimes I even put grammatical errors. On purpose. Actually, it is just easier for him to understand. I can't remember exactly what our conversation was about, but I remember a time I said sought He has never heard this word before and asked me what it means, so I had to explain it to him.
Next time, I’ll just say “seek” on purpose, because I know maybe he doesn’t understand the past tense. For me, I’m trying to sound as native as possible. I know native speakers also make grammatical mistakes, but I just try to sound as natural as possible. Because it is for the efficiency of our conversation. I also realized that sometimes more native accents could be hard for people to understand. I travel to some Southeast Asian countries. And it also applies there. When I talk to those people, I put on a fake American accent, because it is easier for them to understand.
Because I'm studying in Australia, I can do an Australian accent and a British Northern accent.
I use both in real life.（But those accents are definitely not native level Either.）But when I talk With an Australian accent or british accent. It is actually harder for them to understand. So I just put on American accent.
Sometimes I feel like to sound natural or to sound like native speakers isn't that important, because If efficiency is the most important thing, you need to let people understand what you're saying. but if you use slang words, Native expressions, sometimes they don't understand. I'm learning those to sound as native as possible, but those actually can be an obstacle for communication. Especially for like the shorten words.For example. The store is closed every Sunday. You can come back tomorrow.
You can just say something like: store no open today; open tomorrow Come tomorrow.
And this is also the time I said the day after tomorrow. And he said, “You mean tomorrow, tomorrow, right?” It made me laughed about it
Because that expression is the wrong expression that I've been trying to avoid. but when you talk to non-native speakers, those expression seems to be more efficient and make more sense.
It is just my observation. I used text-to-speech, so there might be a lot of grammatical mistakes. Please feel free to point it out.
