She explains this in her FAQ: https://pastebin.com/V3474kYs

tldr: articles and interviews are proofread and corrected by english native speakers.

Which is also not uncommon. I did the same for my Chinese colleagues when working in Beijing.

I do the same for my reports. And that's simply because I want to deliver the best work possible, even if my customers would most likely be more than happy with the version that I would give them directly. Not having your stuff proofread when it is for public consumption is unprofessional.

I was a researcher, so it wasn important for the team to submit papers with good English in them. Doubly so for double blind submissions, where you want to mask that the paper is coming from china to avoid reviewer bias against chinese papers.

wasn?

was?

You're right and I remember reading that at some point, but to be honest I wouldn't have looked for an explanation if one was not provided.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am myself a migrant in an English-speaking country (a Greek living in the UK). I know first hand that there is a big difference between having been taught English as a foreign language, and actually using it to speak with native English speakers day-in and day-out.

My first years over here I had real trouble talking to people and making myself understood, or understanding them, although at the same time I was perfectly fine reading English literature and textbooks, participating in lectures and writing university assignments. I believe many foreign students (if not all of them) had the same issue.

There's an assumption that the way you speak a language reflects your general intellectual skills, but when it comes to non-native speakers it's just wrong. People taught a language as a foreign language acquire oral and written literacy skills in a different order and pace than native speakers. For instance- two friends of mine can read and write Japanese, but can't speak or understand it when spoken.

Basically, speech can be much harder than text for foreign speakers. So using the disparity between oral and written skills was already a very shaky piece of "evidence" in the original claim- even before reading Naomi Wu's explanation. It reminded me of classic conspiracy theorists looking at the shadows in pictures of the moon landings.

Even native english speakers get their articles proofread. It's a standard part of a any semi/professional publishing process.

I wondered about that when I was in college. Had a fellow student who was from China and had pretty poor spoken skills, but I had to write something (I think it was a write-up of a circuit) with him (on an old Mac SE/30) and his written English was amazing. It was such a weird split and not that uncommon or confined to the Chinese as I later found out.

I think it comes down to reading a lot and absorbing that formalism, but not really speaking that way because, well, spoken English is a different bird.

It goes the other way too. I can read and write Chinese far better than I can speak it or listen to it in real time. If I have time to think, I can get grammar mostly correctly but if I have to do it on my feet I make many mistakes with tones and grammar.

I can read Dakotah ok, but I never could speak the language because I cannot really do the guttural without sounding idiotic. Had a boss who learned the language from her uncles, so she was teased by her aunts for "talking like a man". Reading is safer.

How so? That's interesting- how is speaking like a man or a woman different in Dakotah? Is it like in Japanese, where different first-person pronouns are used, or?

(er, not trying to make some political comment on gender roles etc, just genuinely interested to hear from a speaker. I guess I can just google it :)

There are some word differences and tone. I'm pretty poor at the difference since I'm not really a speaker (that whole guttural problem). If you look up Lakota, its basically the same difference since they are pretty close language wise.

On a side note, it is a pain in the butt to search for Dakota as opposed to Lakota on Google because it keeps giving Lakota pages. What a pain.

I think in general it's writing and reading that's easier- possibly because speech is a noisy channel, or maybe because when you're taught a language as a foreign language (at school that is) you get taught from texts and they also teach you a kind of "official" version that's not quite the version spoken by native speakers.

Like I say above, I had a big problem with that in my first couple of years in the UK. I once spent an hour having a conversation with a man from Glasgow. To this day, I have no idea what he was talking about. I didn't understand a word he was saying, so I just nodded along politely. I might have been agreeing to the need for the extermination of all sentient life or that the Earth is flat, for all I know.

I got better at it. I can now understand about 40% of what someone's saying in a Glaswegian accent. I love Scottish accents btw- probably more because I don't understand everything being said.

It is very common for non-native speakers in general, especially if they're self-taught - getting started with texts is easier.