I wonder if that's unique to English though. I'm sure there are some languages which are worse in that regard. I imagine it would be very difficult to understand poorly-pronounced Chinese for example. Japanese, which I speak pretty well, tends to use a lot of idioms, which means saying something by rote application of rules is less likely to produce a natural-sounding sentence than in English (as I judge anyway). English also lacks a gender system which might make it easier than some European languages.
That being said I'm sure there are languages which are better than English in terms of being able to be spoken "incorrectly".
At least in the German language I'm not aware of a similar phenomenon (at least in this manifestation). The German grammar is rather complicated (which restrains, in my opinion unjustifiably, many people from learning German). This has in my opinion the "advantage" that it is "rather complicated" to speak or write something in German completely incorrect without at least being very unsure whether it is really correct.
In English, on the other hand, it is very easy to write non-idiomatic sentences or spell things completely wrong without noticing if you are not hinted by some fluent speaker.
>In English, on the other hand, it is very easy to write non-idiomatic sentences or spell things completely wrong without noticing if you are not hinted by some fluent speaker.
This is the big strength of English. Even when you completely mess it up the person on the other side can usually understand what you are saying. Also native English speakers are quite tolerant of non-native speakers making a mess of the language - while we expect everyone to speak English, we don’t expect you will speak it without mistakes.
I have a different opinion on this topic, but this is the same discussion as strongly vs. weakly typed programming languages (I'm obviously on the side of strongly typed ones).
English is far from perfect and is not well suited to things where precision is required - laws, for example, probably should not be written in English - that is unless your aim is to provide lifetime employment to lawyers.
The thing that makes English so easy to speak badly is that it has very loose grammar. In English we use different words to do what grammar does in other languages. No other language has anywhere near as many words as English so I doubt there is another language that is as loose as English.
This is always brought up but I'd like to see some concrete study about this, like taking a major English-language daily newspaper and a, say, Hungarian one and compare them for number of words used. First you'd need a definition for "word". Is "daily" the same as "day"? Should "newspaper" be counted as an extra word on its own or is it just "news" and "paper"? Is "definition" the same as "define"? Or will you just count the "roots"? It's not simple.
I think everyone thinks the same about their native language, that there is so much nuance and variability expressible in it, compared to the more monotonish, dry foreign languages. We have this myth in Hungary as well, that our language has so many synonyms for stuff, while English is always neutral and cold. This stuff gets shared around on Facebook a lot. Mostly by people who only speak very rudimentary English.
So it's no wonder you think English has many words, if you're a native English speaker.
If you're going to take compound words built from multiple roots out of the equation, then approximately 98% of German words would evaporate... \s
If English has more words than other languages, it's probably because we took them from all those other languages, bastardized them, and grafted them into our own.
To be more precise, English uses word order to do what most other Indo-European languages do with declination and conjugation.
The hardest part of learning German was getting used to V2 verb order (or similarly, verbs with separable prefixes). I can understand the rule perfectly fine, but parsing sentences in real time is extremely challenging.
That being said I'm sure there are languages which are better than English in terms of being able to be spoken "incorrectly".