As a fellow non-native who accepted not to strive for full assimilation, my suggestion is to do the same. You can refine your writing by reading a lot. Books like “The elements of style” and “On writing well” can help with grasping those structural elements you might be struggling to identify. Apart from that, our brain has been shaped by our native language, and we can’t really delete that. Which is great news! It means we can express concepts in English with structures and flows that, if grammatically correct, have the advantage of sounding original, different, sometimes exotic.

One tool I use is Grammarly. I think it’s mostly crap, but if used properly it helps you identify the more blatant mistakes. Oh, and by the way, if you need a non-native speaker ego booster, try and read native speakers’ first drafts of anything.

I wanted to write a message to a Swedish relative to say "Happy Birthday" but the literal translation felt wrong.

I asked my wife how to say "Happy Birthday" and she said "What you've got there is the right translation but that's not what people say".

I think that's one of the hardest things about learning another language is to not directly map words but understand what would be said in a certain context.

There is no English word for Hygge or Fika because the concept simply does not exist. You can find a nearest match but it lacks the meaning.

You know what I struggle with? Writing professional letters (or email) in my native language. I went to university and worked in the industry in the UK and so I only ever had to write in a professional style in English. I was trying to ask for some information from an online shop in Greek the other day (I'm Greek) and I found I had no idea how to start and end the email and how exactly to phrase the question I wanted to ask without sounding like I was talking to my bestie.

Kind of the reverse situation than what you're describing, because I haven't learned to say those things in my native language, but for me it goes to show we learn lots of pre-baked turns of phrase that we adjust appropriately to the context when we need them.

That's interesting because you're right, in English there are different voices depending on the context and who you're talking to. Is it a professional context or casual or if you're supposed to be doing something important or tactful.

In some countries, this is extended to even using different languages depending on the context, especially more in the Eastern countries.

This is only a problem when translating words or short phrases which is usually one of the first things that language learners try to do.

When you know the original intent behind a sentence (for example if you are its author), you can usually convey its meaning it in any of the languages you know well.

As your wife said, there is a way to express a friendly sentiment to somebody on their anniversary and let them know that you remember them. It's just not literally using the words "Happy Birthday".

That's a good point of turning your native language into an asset. The goal of communication is to be well-understood. That's so easy to forget that and strive for something more. Good writing also keeps the readers engaged, maybe entertained, but is there much more to that?

> It means we can express concepts in English with structures and flows that, if grammatically correct, have the advantage of sounding original, different, sometimes exotic.

Yeah, that happens all the time. It always strikes me as unfair when someone comes out with an ostensibly perfect sentence and the result is "well, you didn't make any mistakes; all the words mean what you want them to mean and all the grammar is used correctly. But the sentence is still wrong; that's just not how we say that."

It's useful to learn how they say it, though. Not because we should pretend to be native speakers when we aren't, but because language is more efficient if you know the expected way to use it.

The correct but awkward sentences from non-natives (I also use them, being a non-native English speaker) will more easily get lost in situations with background noise, several people talking, people not paying a lot of attention, etc. because not saying things they way people expect and are used to implies extra effort to understand.

True, but OP was asking for an AI tool to help in this. I think the language bias on such a tool would be enormous, and it would contribute to flatten a piece of writing. Being effective by saying things the right way, or picking the right words to express a specific context, is definitely important. My point was this: once you get to a good-enough point, what you're looking for is an editor (of sorts, not necessarily a professional one). Someone that could recognize how your idiomatic choice of words serves the piece right, or makes it harder to understand. What really helped me was asking native friends to read my posts or my articles, and tell me what they were getting from them. After a while, through this process, you'll get better yourself at recognizing these patterns. Before that, I worked hard on understanding the specific pitfalls of writing in English as a native Italian. One clear example: attributive nouns.

>> One clear example: attributive nouns.

Specific examples, please? I'm curious :)

In a case where a noun is a modifier of the following word, Italians tend to prefer specificity , therefore falling for the “noun + of…” construct. A chicken soup bowl is easy to understand, but for an Italian that’s a “piatto di brodo di pollo”, so an Italian native would tend to feel like “a bowl of chicken soup” is the better choice. In this case there’s no real mistake (and for “bowl of” you might argue there’s almost no meaning difference) but most of the time you end up with convoluted sentences, especially if a genitive is lurking around —- “Andy’s chicken soup bowl” vs “the bowl of chicken soup of Andy”. Understandable, more familiar to an Italian speaker, yet kind of wrong.

Just for reference, the default English constructions would be "bowl of chicken soup" and "Andy's bowl of chicken soup".

"Bowl of soup of chicken" is right out, but "chicken soup bowl" isn't much better. It's so anomalous that I might interpret it as meaning "a bowl for chicken soup" as opposed to "a bowl with chicken soup in it right now".

Thanks for the example!

Wouldn't "piatto di brodo di pollo" translate to "a bowl of soup of chicken", as a more unnatural English sentence?

Greek is similar in that respect and I catch myself sometimes lapsing into such more micro-managed speaking, and I also noticed it in other Greeks (perhaps a few Italians also).

I’m a native English speaker and you all write well enough in English that I didn’t notice that you are not native speakers from your writing. I went back and looked more carefully and noticed a few little mistakes, but nothing I wouldn’t write off as the result of someone writing quickly.

And English, in its predatory way, will adopt those 'different' words and constructions as its own in due time :)

I am using LanguageTool. Not the website, but a command-line tool. You can configure it with all sorts of rules to check all sorts of spelling, grammar, style, and language issues. However, as far as I have noticed, LanguageTool is not a very advanced language-help tool. Still, it did improve my writing a lot. If nothing else, my writing has gotten more consistent.

The cli from here? https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool

Yes. You can build the command-line application Java Jar from that repo. I also combine it with vim (https://github.com/dpelle/vim-LanguageTool).

I think real-time lookup in a corpus would be enough if it's implemented well.

I'm a non-native speaker (reasonably fluent) in two non-English languages, and when I'm writing, if anything strikes me as sounding "off" then I google the phrase and see how common it is.

In my less-fluent of the two languages, I end up doing this a lot, often just to check my work. As a result I write e-mails and such very slowly, but at a fluency level exceeding my actual fluency in that language. Which seems like a good tradeoff for written communication.

It would obviously be useful to have that done for me while I type.

prowritingaid has a very good, free, web-based tool that will parse out all sorts of neat things in your work. for example: i write fiction and have a real problem with “echos” — words that i repeat within a certain distance of each other — and i even miss them when proofing/editing. pwa is a godsend for this. if scrivener would add their own native version of this (hint hint incase any of you L&L people lurk here.. and it would take ten lines of java that i’d give to you for free) i would be completely covered for a word processor.

on the other side, the desktop version is expensive and needs some ui work badly. they say it’s ai-based, but it feels more like a reason to drm the product than anything. still, the free version is excellent for my limited use scope, so i hope you’d have some luck with it too

the other thing to try and do is find someone that you would use as a language buddy. there’s a subreddit (i forgot the name) where people look to pair with others who are looking for/offering certain language combos, then you get on imessage/whatsapp/whatever and use each other as a language bot. right now i’m looking for someone who speaks mandarin or cantonese and needs someone who speaks english, so if that’s you op, hit me up

Well, repetition is considered harmful in literary writing but that, too, is just a convention. There's no reason to force yourself not to do it if you find that it comes to you naturally. Rather, I'd try to find a way to develop it further into a unique style instead. Think of minimal music, heavy metal riffs and chorus...es (chori?), or repeating leitmotifs in classical music. Repetition drives a point home. It's a useful device, in music and visual art, why not in writing also?

Actually, I find that constant repetition of the same words is absolutely necessary in technical writing. I used to do this thing where I'd try to write my research papers as if I was writing literature, trying to find new ways to say the same thing to avoid repetition, and I got some really harsh criticism as a result. I went to my university's center for academic English and they pointed out my mistake to me and suddendly it was blindingly obvious. In a technical paper you have to use the same exact words to refer to the same concept, or you will immediately confuse the reader, who will think you mean two (or more!) different things, one for each different turn of phrase. So I adjusted my writing to exploit the rythm created by the repetition of the same few words every few sentences, because of course I want to convey a precise meaning but I also want my papers to read well. And now reviewers note my papers are well written and clear; and so far nobody has complained about repetition.

i’m with you on the technical bit. in any style of writing where the goal is to concisely convey information, you’re definitely right that style doesn’t matter in most cases, so repeating words isn’t really something to avoid. to kinda piggyback off your anecdote, a lot of people trip into that pitfall of trying to make whatever they’re writing sound too unique, and in doing so, they (often inadvertently) add a layer of verbosity that adds wordiness instead of anything meaningful to what they’re trying to say.

my issue is that i reuse adverbs and adjectives within a few sentences of one anther and simply don’t notice it — like saying “rain fell in gentle waves,” then a sentence or two later, “the tide rolled in, soft, gentle, crashing against…” it just feels.. lazy, unimaginative to me. i read somewhere that it’s a quirk of the brain (perhaps only for some people, i don’t remember) where words in immediate memory get looped and “stuck” there. that seems to be what happens when i write, and it chaps my ass.