Ken Shimura is Japan’s answer to Benny Hill. In this sketch, he demonstrates a problem inherent in having a foreign language taught by non-native speakers. Don’t worry, you don’t have to know Japanese to get a laugh out of this. 
I took two years of German and high school, and both teachers were native speakers.
My daughter took four years of French from a non-native speaker, and the French foreign exchange student who was in her class senior year didn’t really understand the teacher sometimes. Perhaps it was a dialect thing.
English. In Pakistan from Pakistanis. But, it’s a country whose official language is English and where most official, business and educational transactions are done in English.
So do I count?
edited: Actually come to think of it, I also leant Urdu from non Natives as well as Punjabi. And I don’t really speak my supposed native language, Pukhto, all that well.
Four years of German in High School and 2 in college and none had a native speaker/German born and raised instructor. I was told often by Germans that it showed.
My best ESL teacher, the one who moved it from “English is impossible, there is no logic to it” to “English is actually quite easy and the grammar is so much easier than Spanish” is a Spaniard. I went to Ireland the summer after first having her and got placed in the “advanced” group; it was the first time in 12 years this happened with a “first yearer”, so the teachers went and upped the stakes for the following year (sorry, guys!). I had other ESL teachers who were Spanish and not good at all, at least for the logic-based learning style of us analytical folks; the worst ESL teacher I had was American and we had to ask her to please avoid using constructions which would get us failed (such as double negatives).
The only semi-decent German teacher I had counted as a native speaker, having been born in Germany, but ah! She was the daughter of Spaniards so, unlike the other teachers, she actually could differentiate when we said ya (Spanish for “I get it”) from when we said ja (German for “yes”), and she didn’t need us to explain that there are two local languages in Barcelona. Sadly, the methods of the academy were just shite; I’m sure she would have been a lot better left to her own devices.
The closest I’ve come to learning French from a native teacher is learning it from speaking with natives; my formal teachers have all been Spaniards (mixed bag, including both a kindergarten teacher who shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near kids and one of my favorite teachers).
Are you guys watching the video?
I did. It’s got about as much to do with teachers being non-native as with the color of Santiago’s white horse - my native teachers were that bad. The issue isn’t native vs non-native, it’s qualified/good vs unqualified/bad.
Honestly, it was about taking pronunciation lessons from someone whose examples of pronunciation are necessarily imperfect.
It was also very funny.
I picked up a few Russian phrases at a chess tournament from a Russian native.
Later a couple of Russian pupils at my School heard me saying them and told me I had a Moscow accent!
What Irish Gaelic I know I learned primarily from a non-native speaker. However, as this was being taught in Chicago there were a surprising number of native speakers available and he made a point of bringing some in to class, introducing us to them at social events, and so forth in an effort to correct any errors his might inadvertently pass along.
Not that I’m any sort of expert in Gaelic, but I did enjoy studying it.
Yes. I learned Russian in high school from a Ukrainian (who had many stories that have come to mind in the last few weeks 
). My Russian accent is nonetheless pretty good. My Spanish teach was Spanish and my German teacher was VERY German, but I learned French in North Carolina from a native . . . of North Carolina. My French sucks badly.
Although I learned Spanish, I’ve been told I have a Mexican accent. I’ll take that!
I had 4 years of French and 3 years of Spanish in high school - none were native speakers. In college, I had one native Frenchman for one class, the other class was not. I audited a Spanish class taught by a Cuban man - I could barely understand him, but he did have some weird vocal quirks that were distracting - I ended up dropping the class. I also took 2 semesters of German, one taught by a German woman who was wonderful, one taught by a grad student who sucked swampwater big time. I should have demanded my money back from the second class.
In Morocco I met a native Moroccan who spoke English with a German accent, I found it amusing.
Yes.
French - my first French teacher was Madame Barnes. She was one of those interesting people who has an impeccable sense of grammar, and the thickest Anglo accent you could ever imagine.
German - I first studied with a native German speaker.
Italian - I first studied with a native Italian speaker.
Russian - Our prof. for Russian 101 was a Masters’ Degree student who was a native English speaker. I tutored with two native Russians over the course of that year, while I was out of town. Interestingly, one of those tutors would frequently ask her husband grammatical questions that arose. He is, a native English speaker and the head of the Russian department at the University of Ottawa. He and I chatted about how Universities prefer having non-native speakers teach the first couple of years of Russian because they themselves have had to approach the language through its grammar. Native speakers sometimes get stuck because, while they know that this word must be in the instrumental case, they have no idea about any general rule that might govern that example.
There years of HS Spanish taught by Americans.
One semester of Spanish in college taught by a French woman. I could hardly understand her English let alone her Spanish.
Several times when she gave tests where she would say something in English and we’d have to write it in Spanish she’d have to modify our grades because half the class would hear one thing and the other half another.
One example They were heard as They wore
The other problem we had with her was that she was on European time not American time. She could not comprehend that in America classes start and end on time.
I learned Spanish in school from a non-native speaker. She was American, but had met and married a Spaniard while studying in Madrid, and then stayed on past university for a number of years before returning to the U.S. when their children were teens. I am not sure how advanced her Spanish skills were before going to Spain, but I’m assuming they were good enough that she was able to take university courses in Spanish.
When I went to Spain, I was told my accent was excellent, although possibly a little old-fashioned (which seemed to endear me to people who thought I reminded them of their grandmothers).
Sometimes non-native speakers have the advantage for they know the pitfalls of learning that other language.:rolleyes:
My first Spanish teacher in Jr High was not a native speaker, but did spend a lot of time living in Central/South America. She and her husband had a boat and would spend all summer up and down the coasts. I think she’d easily pass as a native speaker during her travels, though she probably wouldn’t have passed as a native to any particular country/region.
My second Spanish teacher, in High school, was from Spain.
I took two years of French in HS from a non-native. Then I took three years of German in college, the first two years from Herr Professor Doctor Otto Springer, definitely a native speaker. Then I audited a French course when I was at U. Ill., from a non-native speaker. Since moving to Montreal, I took two courses, one from a native speaker (Belgian, actually) and one not. I still can’t speak French or German.
Speaking of the fact that people are often ignorant of the formal rules of their native language, I have a colleague who escaped from Germany at age 16 in 1939. He told me he once spent a sleepless night trying to figure out what rule governs which verbs prefix “ge-” to the past part participle. When he discovered the rule, he was astonished at its simplicity and the fact that, as far as he knew, native speakers are not consciously aware of it:
Most verbs are accented on the first syllable and always add the “ge-”. Some are not accented on the first syllable and they never add it.
He spent another sleepless night trying–in vain–to discover the rule that determines whether an adjective forms a noun by adding “-heit” or “-keit”. He was surprised when I told him that adverbs in German are ordered by time, manner, place, something he never realized but, of course, always used properly.
But that “necessarily” isn’t true. There’s a certain brand of Catalans who hate my ass because my Catalan is better than theirs and that leads them to assume I’m Catalan (and politically in agreement with them) but it turns out that I am not Catalan, have no interest in being Catalan, and didn’t start speaking the language until I was in my 20s. And there are native speakers whose accent isn’t understood by most of the people who share their first language - learning cheli or Cockney wouldn’t be particularly useful unless you can also use other dialects that are more widely understood.