The English tend to speak English better and have better grammar than Americans in my experience, but I do prefer American spelling (disclaimer: I'm American)
No. Like everyone else, Americans by definition speak their native language perfectly. There may very well be stylistic differences and you can aesthetically prefer a dialect, but native speakers do not commit grammatical errors.
This is silly. It is like saying that native bipedal humans do not stumble when walking.
There is a well recognized concept of mastering a language, you can claim (and I would agree) that dialects are respectable languages and AAVE is a proper English. Still some native speakers in any language cannot understand long sentences or know how to express complex information.
Otherwise if we go with the truism "everyone speaks their native language perfectly" we simply end up essentially saying that languages are fragmented to the level of individuals and that some language are inherently "better" than others. Both are positions I would not like were they to become mainstream.
> This is silly. It is like saying that native bipedal humans do not stumble when walking.
In linguistics, there is a difference between errors and mistakes. Making an ungrammatical utterance is only an error if it's because the speaker's model of the language is wrong, i.e. because it differs from the one of a native speaker. This cannot happen to an adult speaker, except maybe in pathological cases or to children. Mistakes, however, happen all the time and to everyone.
> Still some native speakers in any language cannot understand long sentences or know how to express complex information.
That is true. I thought it was clear that I was referring to native speakers' grammar when I replied to GP's claim that Americans have worse grammar.
Not being able to understand certain sentences isn't something that only applies to "some" native speakers either:
> A man that a woman that a child that a bird that I heard saw knows loves.
Of course, a sentence like this is unacceptable[1] despite being grammatical.
> Otherwise if we go with the truism "everyone speaks their native language perfectly" we simply end up essentially saying that languages are fragmented to the level of individuals
I'm sorry to disappoint but that is the mainstream view. The language spoken by an individual is called an idiolect.
> and that some language are inherently "better" than others.
I can't follow. Why does the existence of idiolects imply that?
[1] That's the technical term for an utterance humans can't parse (except of course "manually" by analyzing it). This example demonstrates center embeddings. The brain probably fails to parse it because its stack overflows.
The English tend to speak English better and have better grammar than Americans in my experience, but I do prefer American spelling (disclaimer: I'm American)