Everyone seems so good at English so I wondered how many people learned it to such proficiency and how many are just natives
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.
Well native speakers learn the pronunciation first, so it’s harder for them to distinguish between different forms of the same sound combination
although its incorrect, i’d say their are better things to worry about
Wouldnt your “their” be actually “there”?
Woosh
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.
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.
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.
3rd here too and have been casually learning Turkish, Chinese and Spanish with friends.
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.
Not just you:
This is so true… Like I literally can’t understand lyrics even in my native language
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
I learned english because i’m deaf and french subtitles were scarse. Futhermore, i always wanted to read the latest scans :)
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.
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 learned the basics from Sonic the Hedgehog and Streets of Rage. Ready… Start! Time up! Game over! Marble zone! All useful phrases when abroad.
For me it was honestly Minecraft since the translations weren’t a thing for a while after its first release (in combination with school)
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
Native Indonesian and Javanese. Almost all Indonesian speaks one of the local languages + Indonesian as the country has 700+ of unique languages.
Hungarian here, learned in school and through games/videos
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. 😝
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.
So many people from Germany here on Lemmy! I wonder why that is. Maybe free software movement is a bit more popular there? There seem to be so many good German open-source projects!
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.
Considering the high overlap between Lemmy users and internet savvy people, I would say that we are not a good representation.
