We should have a way to know if someone is a native speaker.

Question

We should have a way to know if someone is a native speaker,

Or something like how many years of experience he had even though he's not a native speaker.. and whether he's using it frequently and stuff..

Well you get my idea.. we should have a way to know how "reliable" that answer is without just based on the upvotes/downvotes.

For one thing, if a native speaker tells me 彼たち is preferred to refer to a group of boys instead of 彼ら because the latter may sound like "boyfriends", then of course that would have so much more weight than a non-native speaker who have spoken japanese for years but of course wouldn't know all the corner cases (that may have actually be pretty obvious to a native)

Answer 1

Added: I cannot see anything to discuss about this proposal. We already have a way to know if a user is a native speaker or not: see the user’s profile. If a user wants to state if he/she is a native speaker or not, he/she can do so in his/her profile. Therefore your proposal is already implemented.

But I find it a little funny that you want to know some personal information about other users while you write nothing about yourself in your profile.

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You can check the profile of the user. You may find out some information about him/her.

In my profile, I write that I am a native speaker of Japanese. My intent is that it can be used both as a good sign (native speakers often intuitively know the right expression) and as a bad sign (native speakers usually have not learned much about the language explicitly, and they may also have bad habits). Of course this does not prove that I am really a native speaker, but it probably tells you some information.

Answer 2

In the StackExchange model, reputation indicates someone's reliability, not national origin or years of experience.

Also, requiring people to state their nationality just seems creepy to me.

Answer 3

Personally i think this is a bad idea as the people with the greatest knowledge of Japanese aren't going to be native Japanese speakers. It is going to be Linguists who are fluent in Japanese that I see as being most helpful to this site.

Native's may be good for talking about language as it related to culture, but then again, Japanese language norms change drastically from region to region. Also, natives, in general, are more knowledge of Japanese in use, but may not know what the correct grammar is. Which brings up a good point, which is more important, correct grammar or currently used Japanese.

Answer 4

As a native (American) English speaker, I wouldn't be able to tell you the first thing about English grammar, but I would be able to tell you something about Japanese grammar. I think most people learning another language are probably like this until they get to the point where they no longer need to learn grammar. I'm so used to speaking English that I never think about the mechanics behind it until someone asks me.

Same way with native Japanese. Personally when a native Japanese tells me something, I'll research it and see if I find other examples of what they've said. Besides, languages are always changing so we only have our "experiences" to go on when something changes.

Answer 5

I don't know how you intend to enforce this (but I'm guessing you're just going on good will and honesty here).

I don't think this system exists on any SE site (as I certainly don't recall seeing any "I have been a sys admin for N years" indications when I've been on Stack Overflow) so this seems more like a generic SE request that should be raised with Meta SO.

What makes a native speaker's claims more correct than another answer with N number of upvotes? Perhaps some of these upvotes were from other native speakers, should their votes (both upvotes and downvotes) now carry more weight?

I think this introduces too much subjectivity into the system which makes it essentially impossible to accurately implement.