Everyone seems so good at English so I wondered how many people learned it to such proficiency and how many are just natives
Second language here
I’m not a native speaker but in Sweden we do learn it from a very young age. We don’t dub anything, we watch shows and movies in English with Swedish subtitles. English is also mandatory from 3rd grade up until you finish college. Now, combine that with social media.
I don’t consider myself a native speaker but I am extremely proficient.
I’m Indian, specifically Sourh Indian.
We learn English in our schools and it is he main medium for school and college education.I had to learn English from a young age because it was the primary language used from kindergarten to high school, and even in college.
I improved my comprehension by reading articles and online discussion forums, as well as by watching movies, series, broadcasts, and YouTube videos.
English is technically my fourth language and I started learning it at age 12. However I really got good around age 16 when I started watching a lot of Hollywood movies with subtitles. Even now when I speak fluent English, with dare I say some “elegance”, i prefer my movies with subtitles, because it’s just a happy place in my mind.
Not a native speaker. I learned mostly from American TV and reading Internet discussions. I have also absorbed a lot of more technical language through the native speakers at work. I made sure my coworkers know that I want them to correct my English, and working with a bunch of pedantic nerds, I sure get a lot of helpful corrections!
I can‘t say, but my best guess is 40 %.
I learned the basics from Sonic the Hedgehog and Streets of Rage. Ready… Start! Time up! Game over! Marble zone! All useful phrases when abroad.
I don’t know how good my English is, but it’s my third language. Bengali and Hindi are my first two. I speak a couple more languages closely related to these (e.g. Urdu, Punjabi, Assamese, Odia, Sanskrit etc. Also been trying to learn French). But I can’t read or write in them.
I learnt English from two sources. My reading and writing abilities mostly come from school. I had some pretty good teachers, who encouraged reading newspapers to learn English. At least in my case, it really helped.
When it comes to speaking and understanding spoken English (with all its irregularities due to accents and whatnot), watching movies and cartoons helped. I used to download and watch all kinds of movies during high school, possibly some that I shouldn’t have watched at that age. My love for movies is basically what made me somewhat competent in the spoken aspect of English. (It also got me into piracy, and ultimately into FOSS, so I guess I owe a lot to the great directors whose movies were hard to find legally lol.)
English is my third language, but I read a lot of English books as a kid and spent a lot of time in English-speaking circles. I don’t feel disadvantaged compared to a native speaker as I’m fluent and have been speaking English for a long time.
I’m Russian, I started learning (school doesn’t count) chatting playing pool at Yahoo.games in the beginning of 2000s.
Then I stopped getting translated versions of games (when I got Morrowind, my head literally hurt due to the amount of “foreign” texts I had to read). So, Internet and games taught me in the beginning.
Then, I was asked to translate at business meetings in my (quite small) company, I did some contract translations as well.
Then I got into IT (like 2012 or so), where you use English in many situations. In 2019, I got into an international company, where I spoke English as a main language for three years. Along the way I moved to Denmark, so now, in addition to my kinda broken English, I have a really shitty Danish.in addition to my kinda broken English, I have a really shitty Danish
Thankfully, not much difference between those, eh.
I feel like non native users are often better at both formulating themselves and spelling, compared to many native speakers
Especially the part where people replace ‘have’ with ‘of’. (Would of instead of would have / would’ve)
Non native speaker here too btw
Oh boy, I got so confused when I was a beginner and some American kid told me “would of” is an alternative to “would have”
There are a lot of regional things as well as slang that aren’t universal between native english speakers. Your confusion is kinda like how some new drivers can be better than veteran drivers because the information is still fresh and they haven’t developed bad habits yet. Even as a native speaker, you’ll sometimes be confused with terminology from other areas.
Examples would be stuff like “fanny” meaning something different in north America compared to Britain. “Cunt” is a lot less offensive in Australia than America. “Bless your heart” is slightly more insulting in the south than the rest of the states. Calling someone “buddy” is friendlier in Canada than the states etc.
“i did it on accident” blows my mind. It’s by accident, not on accident.
I learnt it since I was 3. I was literally forced to do it instead of playing outside with my friends. And always out was hard…
Then I found the language Esperanto, that is supposed to be 10x easier to learn and use. I tried it and I can conform that to be true 😊
But I needed English for my (volunteer) work in a social movement, so I slowly learn it. But still had big problems to understand spoken English. Then I found English videos about topic that was very investing for me. I was trying hard to understand and finally I did.
Long story short, I still prefer to speak Esperanto, and much more people should, IMO.
For spoken English, I greatly recommend audiobooks and podcasts. They typically have better narrators, so are easier to understand. As a bonus, one can listen to them while doing household chores and such — for me, consumption of books greatly increased with audiobooks compared to snatches of books here and there.
Oh wow, it’s so cool you speak Esperanto! Can you share your experience with it? Where do you use it? What good Esperanto communities are there? Do you find it actually useful? In what ways did it enrich your life?
I’m also in the process of learning Esperanto (there’s actually a decent amount of us on Lemmy)
I don’t foresee it ever being particularly useful on its own, but it is a really easy language to learn, and I think it’s a great way to learn how to learn languages. I feel like after casually teaching myself it for a few years I’m a lot better prepared to learn another language somewhere down the road
There’s a few Esperanto clubs and such out there, I’m not a part of any of them so I can’t really comment on the community all that much.
One thing that does kind of interest me is Pasporta Servo, which is sort of a free Airbnb/couchsurfing thing for esperantists. Seems like that could be a cool way to travel around on the cheap and probably a good way to get more involved in the Esperanto community. Unfortunately most of my traveling is done with my wife and I haven’t been able to convince her to learn Esperanto with me so I doubt she’s gonna want to go hang out with me chatting with someone in a made up language in a foreign land.
Mostly I talk to my dog in it. She knows most of her basic commands in both English and Esperanto.
English is my second-ish language, but perhaps I have an unfair advantage for this question since I spent nearly all of my childhood in the US and started learning English at age 5.
It wouldn’t be outwardly noticeable, but the remaining non-native element for me would be the alphabet. I learned the English alphabet well before learning English itself, so the sounds of the individual letters are in my mind still part of my first language. In other words, whenever I recite the alphabet or spell words out loud letter-by-letter, it feels as though I am switching back to my first language.
I learned english because i’m deaf and french subtitles were scarse. Futhermore, i always wanted to read the latest scans :)
