Writing exercise 12

It seems to me that for non-native English writers to write in English, reading or listening to English at least an hour a day is a must. Otherwise what I'm doing here will always result in the direct translation of our own language into English and it's hard to make any progress at all or, even worse, it will result in memorizing odd sentences that I make up myself. But I think it's better than nothing....

Sometimes I read blogs written in Japanese by English-speaking people. The other day I stumbled upon an extremely odd one. But as odd as it was, it made perfect sense to me and I thought I could tell what was in his mind before he put the original English into Japanese.... So it was kind of interesting to read and struck me as kind of innovative and even artistic as Japanese prose, in the sense that no Japanese would be able to write that way.... And this led me to wonder if it's always necessary to learn ordinary ways of saying things in a foreign language when you learn to write in the language. What seems ideal to me when non-native writers try to write in a foreign language is being able to write in it in such a way that, even though you are not particularly interested in making your writing look as close to writings by native writers as possible, your writing will not strike them as odd at all. I think it's possible, in part because I have come across some very good Japanese writings by non-native Japanese writers before. I even thought their writings were in a sense better than poor Japanese written by Japanese people, not because they know a lot of Japanese clichés and conventional ways of saying things in Japanese, but because their writings are very logical and convincing although somewhat different from ours, and even though they seem not to care much about sticking to ordinary ways of making sentence in Japanese, for example, in terms of coordinating adjectives with nouns. I guess they can do so because they have mastered the Japanese grammar thoroughly. I mean not the textbook grammar but something that is at the root of the language. Or is it because English is inherently more logical than Japanese? I know that linguistically speaking, that's a misunderstanding, but sometimes I can't help but think so.

What I wanted to say is that logic might be different from convention that permeates language.