Yeah, I agree; native English speakers are actually often worse at English grammar than non-native speakers. It's pretty shocking, really. I have no doubt that you speak better English than a fair number of native English speakers.

I live in England as you know. (temporarily!)

When I first moved here, I kept apologising about my English at work. But then my boss said: Stop that for goodness sake, your English is better than mine! Others said similar things.

And the insane thing is that he might well have been right. Some of the emails he wrote had bad punctuation, spelling mistakes etc. Same thing with people in my team; many of them make several mistakes in just one email. When all this became clear to me, I totally stopped caring about improving my English.

The other thing for people to be aware of: English people are practically disappointed if someone comes from continental Europe and doesn't have a noticable accent! It took quite a while until I realised this. Earlier I had thought that I had to get rid of all traces of accent, and I worked quite hard on it, very nearly succeeding. But there is no real benefit to it in England. The only benefit that I can see is not always having to answer the question "where do you come from?".

A friend of mine (Swedish) has worked in Germany for quite a long time. She told me that the situation there is not the same as in England. It's not OK to make grammatical or spelling mistakes at her level (She is a mid level manager in IT, same as me). People often correct her. Same thing in Sweden and probably in Russia, I suspect. I have no idea why the UK is different in this respect, but it is. Nobody cares if people make language mistakes, particularly if they are foreigners.

But being "rude" according to English standards is a different story..! That is completely unforgivable... And according to the English almost all other nationalities in Europe are "rude"..... In particular the French (in general) and the Germans because they are too straight-to-the-point...
And unfortunately school books in English doesn't tell people how to be "polite" according to English standards. I could rant on about this for a very long time!!!
LOL