This is actually rather funny since when I'm out and about in Lugano people who were just speaking Italian to someone else (like a cashier) will just look at me and start speaking English.

Well, my wife speaks no English, nor her sister, kids, nephews, etc.

Or, maybe they can, just not to me?

Tom

I have the most embarrassing English language problem - whenever I speak with fluent or native speakers I'm fine. Whenever I speak to someone who can barely speak it - for some reason my English also downgrades massively.

I've never been able to figure out why though - and it doesn't happen with any of the other languages I speak.

I also start speaking like crap. I've given some thought to it. I believe it is my drive to empathize with people. I must switch that thing off.

What do you wear?
Picture please, doubts will be resolved.

Objection, Your Honor.

At gun point, I speak about ten languages, and English has by far the strictest word order rules of all of them. That's because its lack of inflection often doesn't even make it sufficiently clear whether a word is, say, a verb, a noun or an adjective, not to mention details such as cases, gender, person etc.. The lack of grammatical specification is compensated by a very strict syntax.

Well, English replaces inflection with context and idioms and, particularly in the spoken form, it's much, much more forgiving (and possibly even the written judging by how folks write much of the time on the net), e.g. why doesn't my German get understood in Switzerland, but the same German gets understood just across the border? They're not different words, not even in different order, just that the words sound different. If such a problem were present in English, I'd need a translator to speak to folks in Texas most of the time.

Granted, this makes it both easier and, at higher levels, much harder to master but, you don't have to learn 14 grammatical cases and vowel harmony to be able to speak a few sentences and be understood.

It'd be an interesting study to have a set list of phrases in a bunch of languages and then see what the success rate is at being understood as a non-native speaker.

because they pay Swiss prices.

I can ask the way to the beach in a very loud voice. Do I count ?

Your son-in-law-in-spe is right ! Why should he speak English with a potential father-in-law who boasts to be in full command of Italian