English has a lot of redundancy. This is kind of complex, but it also means that you can do a lot of "mistakes" and still be understood. I believe that's one re

English has a lot of redundancy. This is kind of complex, but it also means that you can do a lot of "mistakes" and still be understood. I believe that's one reason English has managed to become "the" international communication language (i.e. not only due to historical reasons): You can garble the language in many ways and still be understood, at least by people a bit used to this. In my experience as a traveler working in various countries, and always trying to learn a bit of the language to communicate locally, if the native has learned a little bit of English it'll always be more efficient in communication than whatever I've learned of the native language. And one reason is that due to the redundancy of English the meaning stays the same most of the time, even with tons of grammatical mistakes. "I is" is wrong, but fully comprehensible. Make a single mistake in, say, Italian, and instead of saying "I was stupid now" you're saying "You were stupid now". Argh.. And it's more - if you hear, in a noisy environment, ".... am drinking" then you know that the missed word would be "I". Again, redundancy. There's lots of that in my native language as well, where adjectives etc. changes depending on other factors. Miss out a word and you still get if the table or the tablecloth should be burned (to paraphrase another commenter about a completely different language).