How did you learn to speak English?

[scythe]

Funny, I learned German online in a similar setting. Then I met and partnered up with a half-German. Problem is, she's half French too, and 12 years later, I'm still completely piss-poor at French. Now we have a half-French kid, this is proving to be an issue I'm going to have to rectify.

[ratique]

If you are piss-poor, that means that you know at least all the curse words and how to order some random dish/drink. And let's be honest, that is all one needs in this world ; )

[Airgita]

Hahaha now I'm trying to think if there was a particular phrase that people would say to me that I'd have no clue what they were saying...

Oh, this is also fun, I've since lost my accent (it was pretty soft to begin with) but I still like to use some Aussie slangs here or there and boy does that sound weird! It makes me look like a poser so I want to go up to people and scream at them, "NAH MATE! I'M A FULL ON BOGAN!" (but like, read that in an American accent)

[scythe]

Haha, I'd really like to hear that!

[Bluejay]

I pretty much learned English through playing games when I was like... 6-7? And that was the very first time my teacher introduced me to something wonderful called: the internet. Hahaha Little did she know, she had chosen a life path for me that day.

[goenn]

I love reading books and I mostly watched english shows and stuff hahhaha. HOWEVER, due to that, my mother tongue is super bad hahaha. I get locals asking me whether I'm from America and super zealots saying I'm a race traitor,,,, aawkwaaardddd

[ErithEl]

So basically, if you want to learn another language play video games and watch TV!

But seriously, I have been wondering this for a while because no matter where you guys are from, everyone seems to be able to speak fluent English – which is really impressive to me. I've always felt as though English would be one of the hardest languages to learn since there does not seem to be any rhyme of reason to it. And spelling? That's a whole different story altogether.

[Stellamari]

I was about to say, "Yes, same here!" Then I found out you're also Malaysian haha

[blop]

I think the difficulties depend of your own mother tongue, cause some languages are closer to English than others, or have the same logic.
(and I find spelling in English not so hard because you usually prononce all the letters)

What I think is important to learn a language is having fun while using it, and use it in your everyday life, so watching TV shows or playing video games is a good way to do it.

[Kura]

Learning to speak English was rocky, and full of harassment (it's the second language of both my parents, so I mostly learned from TV and movies, ask what a word means at work or school though and they don't ****ing let you live that shit down and you get harrassed forever for asking). But it was not as hard for me as learning to WRITE English. I didn't start learning to write English properly until I got a computer when I was around eighteen years old and people on the internet could help me out. Most people assumed that if I could speak English I could write English, so I was never properly taught how to outside of ten word spelling tests (that I would always without fail score 0 on) even reading a lot didn't help because though I could understand the basics of the story the author was trying to tell, I did not understand the words they used or anything related to grammar usage.

But yeah... as soon as I got that internet is when I finally started improving beyond grade school level English. I'm still not the best at it, and I use a lot of basic words and grammar in my writing because I don't know it well enough to get too complicated, and I still need to google a good amount of words that I don't know.

Though honestly... I'm kinda of been starting to have really hard time with English again because expectations and proper / correct usage of it has dropped significantly online. Due to favouring small word counts in posts words will be missing letters, sentences will be missing words, and holy ****ing shit acronyms and abbreviations are a ****ing nightmare. I'm always googling those things, and even worse is when after googling those I have to google the god damn words in them cause I don't know what those are either. And then there's the people that post stuff on their phone.... many times I'll be trying to figure out a sentence or why the **** they used THAT word in that sentence only to find out that auto correct has put the wrong word in on the poster.

[yvettegustafsson]

I practically grew up in front of the TV (just like in Scrooged )

And also I'm from Sweden, we start learning English quite early in school. However, I already knew some english beforehand because my sister taught me by practicing her homework with/on me (she was the one who taught me how to read. Bless her heart <3 ) so I already knew the basic stuff. I practiced my reading (swedish) in front of the TV, because everything English is subtitled in Sweden, so I had to pick up the pace of my reading to be able to watch the things my sister wanted to watch on TV. Thanks, Garfield and friends! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMELnad_HRE So at the same time I listened a lot to the English language and started imitating people on TV, which helped a lot

[getsuart]

Play video games, watch TV and read books.
Best training!

[carloswebcomic]

I moved to Australia. Swim or sink, mate.

[FixerTheWise]

Hungarian here!

I am someone who you could call trilingual and here is my story. My family are Slovak Hungarian, meaning the Hungarian minority in Slovakia, so that pretty much mean 2 languages speaking fluently already then there's English. I learned english since pre-school from.... drumroll Cartoon Network!

In slovakia they to this day show Cartoon Network in english with no subtitles. Back then I got suck into just looking at the crazy funny Cartoon Cartoons and just like listening to my parents speak I learned English so that my the time I was in elementary school I was fluent.

I actually think I speak better english then Slovak, but that micht just be because Sovak is a terribly nitpicky difficult language, compared to that English is a breeze.

I speak so good english in fact that from when I was 16 (i'm 24 now) I was writing my comic Shapeshifter completely in English and ironically I now struggle with translations to Hungarian and Slovak XD

But that's my story \o.o/

[jono_thompson]

One arvo, me and my mate planned to hit the turps, and were about to crack open our first tinnie, when we realised the fridge had carked it, so, still keen to knock a few back, we jumped in the ute and headed to bottle-o for some more amber fluid. Unfortunately, my place is out in woop woop, so this took yonks, especially when we had to chuck a u-e after the fruit loop forgot the way. We got there in the end though, and coz I know the sheila who works there, we even got mate's rates and an esky chucked in for free. It was a deadset ripper!

@scythe Love this! I'm Aussie too - brilliant example - I hope that we can keep this culture of language alive into the future, because I have noticed it kinda dying off, especially in the cities.

[NickRowler]

English is my first language and I still suck at it.

Thou, English is my youngest brother and sister's second language. They learned by having ESL classes at school, watching a lot of TV in English and being around people who spoke English to them all the time.

[Starfestival]

First language. Reading some of these comments make me think, geez is English really this hard? Cuz French is a bitch for me spelling and reading wise.

[eleoza]

I learned English by visiting forums at a young age, speaking broken English. People on those forums were very rude and made fun of me or just bluntly insulted me. Many told me to leave and learn some English.
I was hurt, but at the same time determined to learn English and prove them wrong (Even though I knew I'd never see those rude people again, the forum was pretty huge)
So I focused in class and DBZ helped too lol, the cartoon network channel would show 2 episodes each day, the 1st episode would be the episode from the previous day. So since I knew what was being said by the characters I covered the subs and just listened. Later on I just downloaded anime with English subs, that also helped. And just overall interactions on the internet ^^

[carloswebcomic]

Love this! I'm Aussie too - brilliant example - I hope that we can keep this culture of language alive into the future, because I have noticed it kinda dying off, especially in the cities.

Nah, I reckon it's still alive and well, at least in Sydney.
You'll notice it's pretty prevalent when migrants adopt the lingo too with gusto. So I don't think it's going to die off any time soon.

What I do find disturbing is when Aussie comic creators use words like bangs (fringes), cookies instead of biscuits, or even worse, write colour and 'color' to 'internationalise' their comic.
I'm all for making your comic accessible, but when you start modifying your language, then it all gets a bit fake.

[Puppisama]

Mostly through video games and reading since in school it is taught poorly, you learn more by your own.