Everyone seems so good at English so I wondered how many people learned it to such proficiency and how many are just natives
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!
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 Argentinian. I began studying English early in my childhood and I love learning languages.
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.
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”
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”
Also literally… If can both mean exactly something or be used for emphasis
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’m danish…
This sounds almost as if you’re disappointed XD
That was projecting something… XD
Hungarian here, learned in school and through games/videos
German and Russian native speaker here, so English is my third language.
Two native languages, cool! One or both of your parents are Russian?
I’m a non-native English speaker, learned it by watching cartoons without subtitles when I was a wee little squirt
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. 🤷♂️
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 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.
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 learned english because i’m deaf and french subtitles were scarse. Futhermore, i always wanted to read the latest scans :)
