How many of you are non-native English speakers?
How many of you are non-native English speakers?
Everyone seems so good at English so I wondered how many people learned it to such proficiency and how many are just natives
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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.
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I just spend too much time on the internet
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Yup same here
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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.
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For me it was honestly Minecraft since the translations weren't a thing for a while after its first release (in combination with school)
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Heh, I am pretty deep embedded in the Esperanto community. I have started 18 years ago and during that time made a lot of friends, some enemies, some love partners (really, we talk together in Esperanto!). In fact, I have founded a nonprofit nongovernmental organisation that support volunteers to write better Wikipedia in Esperanto - and I love the work and it even pays me sometimes. And because of my activities, I have travel around the planet. I live in Europe, and once I have traveled in one month to Seoul, South Korea and Benin and Togo in Africa to Esperanto meetings. That was crazy! During that month I have fulfilled my 2 childhood dreams - to climb a bamboo and to eat a sugar cane ;-)
So, yeah, it enriched my life pretty drastically. I would say that the the biggest long term benefit that I get was wast widening of my horizons. The world became "smaller" for me / more of it became "my home" and I have become more "world citizen". It may sound cheese but it feels great :-)
There are many local groups over the planet, some event practically every day, many Telegram groups with pretty active community. On Lemmy, there is mostly !esperanto@sopuli.xyz
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BTW a lot of open source programs have Esperanto translations (including Lemmy). Facebook does also for some reason.
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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.
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Absolutely! The videos that helped me to understand English was podcast-like. I am a big fan of audiobooks and podcasts. Mostly to give some rest to my eyes, and to consume them while I am walking outside to protect my physical health.
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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.
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I learned english because i'm deaf and french subtitles were scarse. Futhermore, i always wanted to read the latest scans :)
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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
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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 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.
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I'm a non-native English speaker, learned it by watching cartoons without subtitles when I was a wee little squirt
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I also learned from TV, mainly Friends, Scrubs, Family Guy, and similar, with and without subtitles. Then had a gf/wife for twelve years who was native English speaking from across the pond.
I'm good with math and music, and such people tend to also pick up languages easily, or so I've understood. I would say I speak and write at a native level though thanks to being with that woman for so many years and communicating with her in English, and doing daily communication online in English for decades now.
Also having a curiosity where I look up words I don't know, or when I see new words. And I'm interested in a lot of fields where there's a lot of advanced lingo which also helps. People I listen to are well spoken and good with words, which inspires me.
So I guess all these things combined made me quite proficient. 🤷♂️
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I'm from Spain and English is my third language (currently trying to learn Portuguese)
I've learn it with music (Judas Priest🤟), movies and series.
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For some reason, learning through music is really hard for me. I have zero issues talking and listening to English speakers for years now, but I still have to actively listen if I want to get 100% of some song.
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Not just you:
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As a native English speaker I certainly won't process the words of a lot of songs without a conscious effort
Lyrics are so often indecipherable as well. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jGLYJQJh9c8
One that I remember is that I had heard the song "believer" a number of times before learning its name, I always thought they were saying "pick me up and pick me up and leave me, and leave me". I don't think I even tried to decypher the rest lol
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Same here, I tend to pay attention to the melody rather than any of the lyrics unless I actively try otherwise.
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3rd here too and have been casually learning Turkish, Chinese and Spanish with friends.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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I'm a non native speaker. First learned it while playing Minecraft, and since I've spend multiple hours a day writing and speaking English.
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I'm Indian, specifically Sourh Indian.
We learn English in our schools and it is he main medium for school and college education. -
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.
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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.
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Hungarian here, learned in school and through games/videos
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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.
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Me. Non native
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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.
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yup
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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.
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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"?
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Second, or rather third. Games and media taught me English.
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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. 😝
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English is my 4th language. I mostly use it online and in professional settings.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.)
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Second language here
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Native French speaker. I like to learn new words both in French and English to extend my vocabulary.
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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.
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I'm German. Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit oder so...
Mostly taught myself English, since our educational system sucks so much.
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Native Indonesian and Javanese. Almost all Indonesian speaks one of the local languages + Indonesian as the country has 700+ of unique languages.
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I can‘t say, but my best guess is 40 %.
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Italian here...
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Anch'io.
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Grande!
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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.
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I'm Argentinian. I began studying English early in my childhood and I love learning languages.
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German and Russian native speaker here, so English is my third language.
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I'm danish...
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Considering the high overlap between Lemmy users and internet savvy people, I would say that we are not a good representation.
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 think the "proper" way to simplify it is would've, which is pronounced the same as 'would of'
A lot of mistakes have just become incorporated into the language in the past. Maybe 'would of' is just too blatantly wrong for that to ever happen though
Maybe not really a 'mistake', more of a normal shortening but my personal favorite english-ism is "bye" being descended directly from "god be with you". People just kept collapsing it more and more over time.
Edit: also "a pease" -> "peas" -> "a pea"
"i did it on accident" blows my mind. It's by accident, not on accident.