I suppose I can speak both American and Queen’s English, though I grew up with the latter (my dad is from England).
I learned starting at 3 years old 😊
Now, I am onto a third language of Galician, which is spoken in my country. Maybe I will even learn a fourth for my Japanese girlfriend but her close/immediate family all speaks English.
I started learning the language in school (5th to 10th grade). I had a teacher who insisted very much on grammar which sucked while being a student, but in hindsight it turned out to be a good foundation.
With upcoming internet English became more and more a part of every day life, as there is more content in English availiabe than in my native language. In order to build up a proper vocabulary and to understand figures of speech and play on words I started to watch cartoons in English - first easy-to-understand-ones, like The Simpsons, because I knew the plot of the episodes already since they were aired dubbed on television. In the beginning I found South Park very hard to understand because they speak rather fast, but meanwhile I understand everything now.
Today I am able to speak fluenty.
I learnt English as a child when we got dial-up internet because many applications were not translated and anyways most troubleshooting forums were in English. We had an English class at school but the motivation to actually pay attention was COMPUTEEEEEERS 😄
Now it feels so weird talking about computer stuff in French, I have no clue how to explain anything because it all comes instinctively in English 😅
I’m a bit younger than the days of dial-up but for me too the motivation was COMPUTEEEERS and the internet
😅 That sounds amazing though! J’adore les ordinateurs
School started teaching it at age 9, but really I had started picking it up myself so that I could actually understand how to play the Pokemon Cards by age 6-7 or so
Quite young. It’s my third language, but I must’ve been under five when I learned it.
Moved to an English-speaking country where I lived for some years as a child.
What country?
You just wanted to brag about your Japanese girlfriend 😜
I started to learn English when I was 12. I think I’m not fluent enough (as I don’t speak with people irl that much in English). I would not like to share what is my mother tongue but now I know 4 languages. Thinking about to learn Japanese but not getting time.
That’s awesome!!!
When I was 10, I moved to another country and started studying in an international school. I essentially only spoke Portuguese (my mother tongue) with my parents and my brother, which meant I was fully immersed in English for a huge chunk of my formative years.
English isn’t technically my mother tongue, but it might as well be. I write better in English than I do in Portuguese, because that’s the language I wrote in in school. My Portuguese is flawless, and nobody would ever say that is isn’t my mother tongue, but in some situations my English is just better. I consider myself to have two mother tongues, even though I’m technically an ESL speaker.
I have also not been able to replicate my level of English in other languages. I’m fluent in German, and I have no difficulty with any aspect of the language, be it reading, speaking, writing or listening, but it’s really clear that it is not my mother tongue.
English is basically like my mother tongue too! I learn at age 3!
When I started school, about six years old.
What’s your native language if that’s okay to ask? Mine is Spanish.
My parents migrated to Australia but only spoke German at home, so that’s what I learned. When I started school, they discovered their mistake, and I had to learn English. I remember my father saying for many years, “This is Australia, we speak English in this country”, my younger sister and I weren’t allowed to speak German at home, so I forgot a lot of it. In high school, we had to learn French or German, so it was natural to learn German. So German is both my first and my third language.
Wow!! Amazing!!! My friend has Norwegian as her second because it’s what she was learning second but also Norwegian as her, like, third or fourth. She is not at all fluent in Norwegian but it’s her childhood language.
I have an uncommon timeline. I come from a country where English isn’t the primary/national language, but a majority of the population can speak/write it. My parents had the foresight to teach us siblings English first so it would be more natural to us and therefore give us an advantage in our future careers. So I technically learned English first before the local/native language. But because I grew up in my country and only being exposed to American English through movies/tv, my English isn’t exactly “native” and you can pick up within a minute of speaking with me that I’m not a native speaker. But I’m always told that I don’t have the typical accent people from my home country have when speaking English and mine is more neutral.
That’s very interesting (using my alt because my responses made Lemmy glitch 😭)! What country is it if you want to say?
Started learning it from video games at about 5-6 years old, had tutor classes paid for by my dad (for the whole class) from 7 years old. Then from 10 years old I had summer camp overseas every year until 13, then sent off to the UK.
Tried to pick up other languages along the way from Japanese to French to Italian to Spanish to Ukrainian to Polish, but none of them really stuck, shit just takes forever and it’s hard to keep coming back to it after the novelty has worn off from a few hours of translation exercises and flash cards and such.
Understandable. What’s your first language?
Russian
I want to learn Russian!!
это круто! я также говорю по-русски
School started teaching us when I was 11 but I had learned a few things before that, mainly from video games
Do you know which games? I learned English at age 3
Spanish was my first language, but I started English in elementary school. Currently learning French lol.
My Spanish is maybe B2, my English is solidly C2, French is A2
Uuuuu increíble!
I was five years old, learned from my father.
i was 9. a year later, we moved to the u.s.
I have been speaking english for 13 years now and people say i’m fluent (though idk if my level is native yet even as a russian-american)
