When to trust native speakers' abilities and when not to

Have you ever been informed or corrected by a native speaker of your target language only to later figure out they were mistaken?

I ask this not out of a desire to generate ridicule of such natives of different languages, but as a genuine springboard to what I think is an important topic. I know that in my native language, English, I meet people every day that make mistakes speaking or writing it (myself included), so the same must be true of every other language on the planet.

It's my estimation that in the online language-learning community, the opinions of native speakers are sometimes not examined thoroughly enough because the assumption is, "Of course they know what they're talking about, they grew up speaking it." But in a strictly logical sense, this doesn't actually tell you anything about that person's individual education level or their ability level in the language they're using to teach. As a byproduct of this, you get today's age of YouTube teachers who may not even have real-world credentials, although they are clearly native speakers. (Not that that doesn't count for anything... a YouTuber was the one who recently explained something that vindicated my earlier encounter where I thought I was wrong.)

submitted by /u/EnormousHatred
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