Everyone seems so good at English so I wondered how many people learned it to such proficiency and how many are just natives
Italian here, I had luck with my English teachers and my parents and then the internet encouraged me to learn extra
I’m non-native (native German, learned English in school). Nearly everything I read or write is English, though, and I’ve probably read more English books than most of the native speakers.
Considering the high overlap between Lemmy users and internet savvy people, I would say that we are not a good representation.
Native Indonesian and Javanese. Almost all Indonesian speaks one of the local languages + Indonesian as the country has 700+ of unique languages.
I am Nepali. I am probably the only Nepali using such obscure platform. And I say it proudly to others. They think I am ninja, and ignore me. 😝
German and Russian native speaker here, so English is my third language.
I’m danish…
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.
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”?
Woosh
r/wooooshwith4os
English is my 4th language. I mostly use it online and in professional settings.
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.
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.
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’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.
