Some of the things are really subtle. My wife grew up in Tamil Nadu, India - and English was her primary language growing up. When we travel, her English is i

Some of the things are really subtle. My wife grew up in Tamil Nadu, India - and English was her primary language growing up. When we travel, her English is infinitely easier for people to understand than mine, despite how hard I try. (In India, especially, but elsewhere too.) I think, "speak simply, deliberately, clearly, not-quickly" and get blank stares. She can mumble and speak quickly - comprehension is instantaneous. Some things are obvious, like your example of modifying word order. Front-loading objects in sentences seems critical for understanding. Hindi and Tamil are both subject-object-verb languages, though I'm not convinced this is the reason it works, and suspect it's more universal than that. Her pronunciation also changes dramatically. It doesn't feel so much as speaking broken English as being fluent in a local pidgin. After a while, sentences like "Ma, what you take?" start to sound so natural that I catch myself doing it unconsciously.