Andy Rabagliati wrote:
But you can brutalise English and still be understood, which I gather is not the case for Chinese.
I think this is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy: semi-fluent or even broken English can be understood because people are used to reading or hearing it, since it's a common second or third or fourth language. Compare to, say, modern Greek, where people are astounded to even hear it language spoken with a foreign accent---generally you either speak it natively or not at all, so people aren't used to making sense of semi-fluent speech/writing.
-Mark