What is your native language and how you learned english?

[eak]

Hi guys! I been reading all your answer here and I made a few conclusions:

1. Many of you (almost all europeans) started with english at very young age in the school.
2. The tv shows, video games, computers, films, music, articles from tits magazines, soviet teachers and others funny stuff are the best ways to learn.
3. Many of you use the english in their works.

 

[eak]

The hardest part is to speak English, especially since I don't speak English very often.

I'm in very similar situation, and this supposed more effort to improve the english skills.
:Spin:

Russian
I was like 4 years old, Soviet Union was living out it's last days. My parents found a private teacher for me to study English basics,
We also had lots of pirated VHS cassettes with poorly translated American movies, so you could ignore what the interpretor says and just try to understand the original text. It was pretty absurd, but after the crash of Soviet Empire, they have even translated porn

Dude I was flashing with your experience! Stories from last days of the USSR are pretty motivational, educational, historic and sometimes funny (the strong Russian accent and vodka smelling breath helps a lot) Thanks a lot for sharing!. PS: I never seen traslated porn but must be a weird experience .

:Spin:

Practice is everything.

Wise words, men
:Spin:

Just wanted to add - writing is pretty easy, speaking is the hard part, I just had the feeling
that I sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger the whole time...

Indeed yes! speaking is the hard part. Man, Schwarzenegger is the guy! all your customers would respect you with her accent, trust me.

:Spin:

 

[arvoitus]

My native language is Dutch, and like most people here i learned it with gaming, IRC, forums, movies, music.

Natively I speak Dutch - though most people from the Netherlands would probably not agree; Limburg isn't known for its clean accent.

Not really, it took me 6 months of internship to fully understand my coworkers in the company. And after 4 years of living there i finally know the most common spoken accent/words.

Which part of limburg do you come from?

 

[Nimvi]

are the bilingual people located in and around Stockholm for instance ?

From Dutch perspective, it seems to be almost a given that we should speak the language of the people visiting us. I live as far away from the big cities as geographically possible, yet everyone of my generation seems to have little trouble communicating in at least 3 languages. Usually German and English, but French is also not uncommon.
When people from those other countries come here, they usually just speak their native language and expect you to understand that.

I think the reason why this became a thing is probably simple: you cannot expect anyone in the world to speak Dutch, so you'll have to adapt or you'll lose business.

Hi guys! I been reading all your answer here and I made a few conclusions:

1. Many of you (almost all europeans) started with english at very young age in the school.
2. The tv shows, video games, computers, films, music, articles from tits magazines, soviet teachers and others funny stuff are the best ways to learn.
3. Many of you use the english in their works.

I think that's spot on

Not really, it took me 6 months of internship to fully understand my coworkers in the company. And after 4 years of living there i finally know the most common spoken accent/words.

Which part of limburg do you come from?

It's terrible, isn't it? I hate speaking Dutch around Holland; I'm constantly aware of how retarded I must sound to them. On the plus side: I can speak my dialect in all the local German cities (Aachen, Köln, etc) and they will understand me just fine.
I'm from Vaals. I live so close to the borders of both Germany and Belgium, that I could throw a rock and hit both of them

This was a really good idea for a thread btw!

 

[ze kink]

My native language is Finnish. I started learning English from cartoons at about 5 to 6 years old - many of the kids' shows we had on VHS were subbed, not dubbed. So as I couldn't really read fast enough yet, I just mostly immersed in the cartoons and slowly started to put the words in the subtitles and the spoken language together. Computer games - we had an old black & white Osborne at home which could run a few games - and NES games helped quite a bit too. So when I went to primary school, I already knew the basics of English quite well. I never really bothered to do any homework etc. when we started studying English at school in third grade. But I played through Final Fantasy 7 at fourth or fifth grade, which was probably a lot more impactful than any of the English taught at school . After primary school I applied to an "international" lower secondary school and attended a class that was taught about equally in English and Finnish, which helped immensely with spoken English. And about at that point we got a broadband connection at home, so I was kind of spending most of my free time in a virtual English environment too, even though I never really thought about it.

I also know Swedish like most Finnish people, albeit far worse than English, because it was never "just there" all the time like English was. It's a compulsory language for us at school, just like English. I took optional German at lower secondary school, but stopped after that, and have forgotten most of it already. Also did one course of Italian at upper secondary school, but the teacher sucked and I decided to drop it.

I've been into studying Japanese for quite a few years now, but only about a year and a half ago got into studying for real, on my own, utilizing the "AJATT method", so to speak. I've been going through Heisig's Remembering the Kanji too, but I'm only at about 500 kanji now, so there's still 1700 to go. This past summer I was for the first time able to converse almost completely in Japanese with a Japanese person, which felt pretty awesome. My studying besides Heisig comprises mostly of watching shows in Japanese without subtitles, and all of that fun stuff. My iPhone is in Japanese, and I use Siri in Japanese. So pretty much what I did naturally with English as a kid. The problem is that I still can't read properly though, which limits my intake of the language quite a bit.

I picked optional Mandarin at school too, which will start in a few weeks. Hopefully I won't be mixing up hanji and kanji too badly.

I'd recommend Antimoon if you're still trying to learn English. It seems like it's basically what inspired AJATT, and for English instead of Japanese. Check it out: http://www.antimoon.com/

 

[kev]

I speak pirate.

 

[Mago]

Native language is german. sort of at least

we started english pretty early in school (like 8 or so), and I just stuck with it until graduating, always thought it was a cool class.
It also did help that when I met my girlfriend at that time, we had to speak in english which we did for the first 1 to 1.5 years or so, until she got unbelievable good in german very early on.
Because of her and her family I also understand quite a lot italian, I speak it like tarzan though. Or at least the italian from around rome...it's a pretty dialect heavy language, but luckily both she and her mother had a very "clean" italian with not a lot of roman accent in there.

Funny enough my pronunciation is a lot better in italian than in english, for grammar and so on it's the exact other way around.

I have no idea how bad I really sound like Ahhhhnold while talking english, but I think it's worst than I think

 

[Jaymz]

English

 

[JHA]

Native language Finnish. Started studying English in middle school in the third grade so about 14 years in total. Rest is from watching movies, playing games, listening music, using computers and reading forums which all are pretty much in English. Even if you don't necessarily understand what is being said in a movie for example, you'll start connecting certain phrases with certain actions and you "know" what it means even if you can't exactly explain it in words. Sometimes if I don't know some special word I look it up on Google Translate.

 

[Nimvi]

Even if you don't necessarily understand what is being said in a movie for example, you'll start connecting certain phrases with certain actions and you "know" what it means even if you can't exactly explain it in words.

True. especially kids are great at that.
I had a recent experience with this. As a kid, I watched these German animations from a comic character called Werner. My German must have been pretty crummy back then, yet I understood every word of it.
So I tried to watch it again recently... and I barely understood anything, because the characters speak in a very thick northern dialect. I never even noticed that; it used to make perfect sense to me.

 

[jangoux]

brazilian Portuguese. My father bought me a lot of american gaming maganizes when I was a kid, so I always asking what was this and that and soon after I was taking classes and everything was too easy for me. I quit it at age 12 and started reading, using internet forums ( ) and soon enough I was OK at english.

 

[StefTD]

True. especially kids are great at that.
I had a recent experience with this. As a kid, I watched these German animations from a comic character called Werner. My German must have been pretty crummy back then, yet I understood every word of it.
So I tried to watch it again recently... and I barely understood anything, because the characters speak in a very thick northern dialect. I never even noticed that; it used to make perfect sense to me.

 

[Deus.exe]

English

My situation is a bit different as I was born and raised in Australia and moved to Germany when I was 21 when the only German I new were Rammstein lyrics (yeah I know). I basically learnt my German through watching the Simpsons. In Germany as in Australia (and indeed I assume, the World) at least 2 episodes of the show are aired every day and as I've watched that show since it was first broadcast the dialogue of the first 12 seasons (at the time) had been seared into my memory. As pretty much all Germany TV is dubbed I didn't understand what the characters were saying in German but I could remember what the original dialogue was. So gradually I pieced together my knowledge of the Language with Homer's help.

 

[eak]

English
. As pretty much all Germany TV is dubbed I didn't understand what the characters were saying in German but I could remember what the original dialogue was. So gradually I pieced together my knowledge of the Language with Homer's help.

Your memory is awesome, and this is a cool way to learn.

 

[Nimvi]

La paloma ohe! Einmal muß es vorbei sein!