Steve Kaufmann said in one of his blogs about teaching English, many students have problem using the right words when the express something. I have seen same problem with Swedish (which is my mother language). Sentences written by someone learning Swedish, which often doesn’t have many spelling errors, but the sentences sounds strange. Not how a native speaker would write it. I assume this is something difficult to learn. Maybe the only way is to be exposed to a lot of the language you are learning?
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Yes, just lots of reading and listening until you can tell that a word/phrase doesn’t sound quite right.
I think that non-native speakers will nearly always make mistakes, but the important thing is to understand and be understood. Heck, even native speakers make frequent mistakes.
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You’ll probably come across this even when talking to other natives, if they come from a different region, a different generation or a different socioeconomic background. I’d say it isn’t a big deal as long as what the person says can be understood.
I’d say that to some extent this can even enrich the language. A lot of the youth’s language here in Germany is heavely influenced by the english language. We even have adapted the progressive tense in casual speech, even though it formally doesn’t exist in our language.
As a learner of Korean I often come across expressions that differ strongly from how we would say it in German or how it is said in English. But I often think: “Ok, that’s an interesting way to express it.”. It introduces you to a different way of looking at things, which is imho one of the biggest advantages of learning a foreign language.
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Or from different time periods. The use of one’s own native tongue in many (most?) cases has evolved through the years. The way people spoke or wrote in the 1800’s or even just twenty years ago can be quite a bit different. You’d definitely get some weird looks speaking like someone from the 1800’s.
Of course communication is the most important thing. Not the words used, even if they are not the “correct” ones.
Accent is an other thing. Different native speaker have different dialects, depending from which part of the country they are. Some dialects are so difficult to understand, that the communication suffers.
Some learners speak/write a foreign language perfectly grammatically and with the “corret” words, but still have a thick accent. But the communication still works.
But as I have noticed, when using “incorrect” words in text or speach, can make the communication difficult. The native listeners/readers expect to find/hear other common used words, instead of seldom used words, and even wrong words.