Everyone seems so good at English so I wondered how many people learned it to such proficiency and how many are just natives
Considering the high overlap between Lemmy users and internet savvy people, I would say that we are not a good representation.
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
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”
Also literally… If can both mean exactly something or be used for emphasis
“i did it on accident” blows my mind. It’s by accident, not on accident.
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’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.
Hungarian here, learned in school and through games/videos
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.
I’m danish…
This sounds almost as if you’re disappointed XD
That was projecting something… XD
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 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.
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?
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.
in a made up language
Aren’t all languages made up?
Yes, all languages are made up. But some are more made up :-)
BTW a lot of open source programs have Esperanto translations (including Lemmy). Facebook does also for some reason.
One of the reasons that I love free / libre / open source is its high acceptance of Esperanto as an interface language. I myself also helped translate bunch of them (now I am searching for money to pay others to translate them :).
Facebook had a program of volunteer translations years ago. I helped a bit by rating existing translations. Then some law came that prevented for-profit corporations to use volunteers as translators and the program was shut down. Similar with Google, who still has parts of interface in Esperanto. Rumors go that Gmail was once fully translated into Esperanto, but the political decision went to not deploy it…
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
Very inspiring! I think you convinced me to give it a good try. Thanks for your story and the links!
Cool. For learning Esperanto there is a great site https://lernu.net/ and also Duolingo, and others. After some time came back and comment about your progress, I am interested in your story 😉
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.
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.
German and Russian native speaker here, so English is my third language.
Two native languages, cool! One or both of your parents are Russian?
My mom is from Ingushetia (in USSR times counted as part of Chechnya, now a Russian republic). My dad is German.
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 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.
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.
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”?
