Or the fanciful “ghoti” as a way to spell “fish.”
My admiration for non-native English speakers who manage to wrap their heads around English orthography knows no bounds.
If there is a silver lining to English spelling, it’s that it does provide information about a particular word’s origin.
PS: every other language I’ve studied—even the alleged bears like Russian and Ancient Greek—has had rational, straightforward-to-parse orthography.
I quite enjoyed this thread. 
I work with a Pakistani chap who, on first moving to New Zealand, spent some time teaching English as a second language to other immigrants. He told me a story about a student who was petrified by the idea of “catching a bus.”
My favourite insanity of the language is prepositions. “After he chopped down the tree he chopped it up.”
As a non-native English speaker, I enjoy this thread more than anybody could believe.
It is very interesting to read and sometimes even quite funny to watch the interactions between native English speakers from different regions and even continents. It helps with getting a different perspective on nuances when stumbling upon errors I am making again and again. 
My favourite insanity of the language is prepositions.
I think that one of the mistakes I am making most of the time is using wrong prepositions. And I am amazed about the fact that I did not receive any negative feedback once about mistakes I have made in this community, although I have made lots of them for sure. And that is after almost seven years now. (Which does not mean that I do not want to learn about mistakes, it is the only way to get rid of them in the long run.)
Very true – and one of the reasons it’s so much fun learning languages!
Prepositions and other ‘little’ words are one of the hardest things for learners to get right in any language because they often have no logic to them.
E.g. In English we listen to the radio, in Welsh you listen on it (gwrando ar y radio), but in French you just listen the radio (écouter la radio.) and in Russian “listen radio (in the accusative)”. No way of guessing if you don’t know, but if you get it wrong it will mark you down immediately as not being a native speaker.
English is also a nightmare because we have so many ways of denoting tenses with auxiliary verbs. ‘You are going’ vs ‘you go’ vs ‘you do go’ – it’s the same verb in French.
On the other hand, we don’t mutations, as Welsh does, where the first letter of a word can change in certain circumstances after a certain word, or in a certain grammatical situation, but only certain letters mutate, and different letters have different mutations, and in any case the mutation is sometimes based on a word which should be there but which is usually dropped in speech.
So…
Fortunately all the plurals don’t mutate (ein tacsi - our tacsi…), and we learners are always told not to worry about it because you’ll be understood and native speakers don’t get mutations right all the time anyway, but still, it does add to the fun of learning…
One of my favourite bits of learning languages is trying to find equivalents for idioms. There’s a lovely page on Wikipedia giving various terms for ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’ in different languages: Raining cats and dogs - Wikipedia. The Welsh equivalent is ‘raining old women with sticks’, and the Dutch (apparently) ‘raining shoemaker’s apprentices’.
Well that’s probably because your English is very, very good and it would seem presumptuous to correct it!
But as you did ask: 
… the only ‘non-native’ phrases I can detect in your post have to do with the various forms of the present tense. E.g.
As a non-native English speaker, I enjoy this thread more than anybody could believe.
I think it would sound more natural to have ‘I am enjoying…’ or ‘I have / I’ve enjoyed…’.
But it’s quite hard to explain why! I think it’s because, either you’re focusing on your feelings as you read the post (present continuous), or that you have finished the thread and you have enoyed it so far.
‘I enjoy’ on its own has more of the meaning of something you do regularly or habitually, so ‘I enjoy this thread every time I read it’ would work perfectly.
But here
… one of the mistakes I am making…
it’s the opposite. ‘I am making’ focuses on the ongoing state, but you really want to show that you make this type of mistake regularly, so ‘I make’ sounds more natural.
(This is all from the perspective of an elderly native English English speaker – who knows what applies for other variants!)
Apologies if you didn’t really want to know any of this…
Not only are they illogical, they differ from place to place, which makes it even more difficult.
American English:
Different from
Cater to
British English:
Different to
Cater for
(Sorry, pressed the button before I was ready…)
Cater to and cater for are different, though – at least they are in UK English.
Cater for: to provide services for the benefit of someone
Cater to: to make special arrangements for someone, or to give in to someone/circumstances.
“We’re catering for three people today” vs “We are not catering to his childish whims”.
It’s difficult to pin down precisely, but I wouldn’t use ‘for’ in the second sentence.
Also, we’re quite happy with ‘different from’ or ‘different to’ (in fact, ‘different from’ is considered a little more correct). 'Different than is considered ‘bad’, although people do say it, of course.
Interesting! Your explanation of “cater to” vs. “cater for” helps me make sense of the most common usage I heard in Uganda, for example, “This school caters for students in S1 to S4.”
American English — at least the variety I speak — doesn’t really use “cater” that way at all. We’d more likely say “serves.”
Apparently you use “cater to” as we do.
I’d picked up “different to” as being UK English from various British podcasters and YouTubers. I wonder if it’s just more common than “different from,” even if “different from” is more correct.
The one that drives me crazy in American English is hearing (especially among my students and other young people) “based off of” instead of “based on.”
I must be getting old…
At school (a long long time ago) I was taught, ‘similar to, different from’, and that’s what I use, but you’re right that ‘to’ is perfectly acceptable and I wouldn’t like to guess which I hear more often, as they’re ‘transparent’ if you see what I mean.
‘Based off of’ eh? Well, well, well 
In Australia, “bloody” seems to be an all purpose adjective, used to express or emphasise emotions; amazement, appreciation, scale, anger, good natured joking, pejorative, euphemisms, abuse etc. It is also a very mild form of expletive in Australia (but not other countries)
Example: “That bloody (stupid) drongo (fool) in his bloody (very) big van, hit my bloody (very good friend) mates car and bloody (damn well) near killed him. His car is a bloody (complete)wreck and he was bloody (extremely) lucky”.
Clear as bloody mud? 
It can work exactly like that in some versions and among some groups speaking British English, but I suspect it would feel a little old fashioned to many groups and “bloody” would be replaced with rather stronger cuss words these days.
When I grew up using the word “bloody” would be cause for a serious telling off or worse.
Or the threat of having your mouth washed out with soap by an irate mother.