Everyone seems so good at English so I wondered how many people learned it to such proficiency and how many are just natives
English is my 4th language. I mostly use it online and in professional settings.
German here.
Basically 80-90% of my media consumption is in English.
I search (mostly) in English, read documentation in English and document my own stuff in a mix of English and German (we call this Denglisch in Germany (compound of (D)eutsch+Englisch)I’m Dutch, but due to the large amount of English content I never really had an issue with English. While I struggled with German and Fr*nch, I never had to pay attention or study for English lessons. I just did what felt natural and ignored the homework etc. Not that I’m a great English speaker or anything, my vocabulary is sometimes a bit limited which makes me have to search for the right words to use. But when watching or reading I can follow pretty much anything. I also sometimes feel like I’m more resilient to accents than native English speakers, maybe because we get exposed to British and American English and therefore kinda learn a more generalized representation of the language? Idk, maybe that’s not a thing
I like to think I learned most of my English from watching nickelodeon past eight. Watching drake&josh, iCarly, the Simpsons and Southpark with Dutch subtitles on was a big part of me when I was younger.
A bit of the same boat (minus the 3rd lang. Am only bilingual).
My struggle is primarily switching and mainting the speed but also the vocabulary at hand. And I feel more pressured while talking than writing.
My first and mother tongue is Farsi but I haven’t spoken it out loud in any sustained fashion in actual decades at this point and I learned English when I was very young so I guess at this point while English might not be my “native” language, it is my primary. I noticed some time ago I think in English and when I go to speak Farsi I stammer, it is kind of a bummer but I’m more focused on Spanish than learning how to speak a language I am not around.
Swede in France. My grades were quite bad in the language domain, but I read loads of books when I was younger, uni books were in english, foreign tv is subtitled in sweden, worked with foreigners so English is often a given, guess it all adds up.
I always cringe when I see native speakers confuse “it’s” and “its”, “their”, “they’re” and “there” and all the other subtleties of their language. But then again, I’m a pedantic German and maybe Americans are so anti-education already that they’re cool with that.
although its incorrect, i’d say their are better things to worry about
Wouldnt your “their” be actually “there”?
English is my secondary language, but I’ve always been drawn to it. I live in Denmark and we don’t dub TV shows, but subtitle them instead. Also I started reading novels in English at a young age, so that has surely helped.
I am a native English speaker but live in Denmark and so many people here are so proficient in English. It’s super impressive to me!
Native French speaker. I like to learn new words both in French and English to extend my vocabulary.
I learned English mainly by playing video games. I remember playing Super Mario Bros. in English while still learning to read French.
I’m from germany. I watch a lot of YouTube. Also I work as software developer, so I need to read many english manuals. Wich don’t means, that my english is great. But it could also be worse.
I had a lot of friends from germany and i was a little bit shocked that they didn’t speak a second language. They all kinda understood english on a surface level, but not that great. Has that changed?
Depends on the community.
I had one that claimed to be able to read but not speak English.
Everyone else was able to do both to some degree.But that experience comes from a school where everyone trained for an IT related job.
I won’t say that. I’ve born '95 and i had english lessions since 3rd class. My “little” cousin (born 2001) had english lessions even in kindergarten. However, it may depend on the school type you’re going to. Also it depends on how you’re using your skills after school. I at least read and listen a lot to english. However, I never actually speak it, so my pronunciation is really bad 😅 Others may use their english skills more often - or not at all.
I’m German. Back in my day, we had 9 years of English classes in school and from what I’ve heard it’s even more now. I was lucky to have a teacher who had spent a couple of years in the UK so he had much less of a German accent than most other teachers at our school and was also able to give us a lot of insight into how people actually speak, compared to the rather formal and stilted examples in our textbooks.
Between social media, movies, shows and a job in software engineering, I would say that on most days I read and listen to more English than German.
I’m Argentinian. I began studying English early in my childhood and I love learning languages.
Dutch, we don’t dub our movies (luckily) and prefer easy trading over valueing our own language. My biggest problem is finding an accent that fits me. Should I go for posh British, 'Murican, or Dutch “steenkolen Engels”?
I am, my spelling and grammar are rusty as hell, so I’m here to practice. I’ve found that people are too nice to correct my mistakes (which I make a ton of), so I usually catch them myself re-reading my comments :s.
Hungarian here, learned in school and through games/videos
Second, or rather third. Games and media taught me English.
