How did you learn to speak English?

[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.

[Herofeeder]

11 years of Cartoon Network can make you Oxford material(jk)

[TheVoidchildProject]

Watching cartoons as a kid. Didn't rot my brain (take that mom)!

[eslameldeeb]

Watching cartoons as a kid. Didn't rot my brain (take that mom)!

EPIC!, this one killed me! XD

i watched a lot of undubbed imported English cartoons at a very young age, before i even go to school, it didn't make me fluent, but always made me ahead of my schoolmates in English later on

in Egypt, we started studying English in school in 4th grade (10 years old then), but still didn't help that much
Until i played Final Fantasy 5 on the SNES, this game was nuts, and made me read tons and tons of narrative-based English and that helped soooo much
GTA games helped a lot too

in college, i studied English Literature and good Shakespearean plays
during college, i read a lot of books on mythology, philosophy, history, religion, occultism, science.. etc.

after graduation, i worked in customer service in a UK based telecommunication company that had an account in Egypt and that helped enormously too

plus watching a lot of youtubers and read forum topics, English and i are besties for quit a long time now

[jonufele]

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

[BlackMantaStudios]

Well, I'm also a Flip, so being fluent in English is a given. That said, I also craved books when I was young (mostly textbooks; fiction didn't appeal to me until later), and they were all I had throughout my childhood since I'm not the outgoing type of kid. I use English when chatting with people over the Internet--I just feel awkward using Filipino on the web for some reason. Though I must say I'm not really good at oral English.

[samchiewhan]

I'm from Singapore, and even though English is unofficially the language everybody uses, the quality of fluency can vary from "atrocious" to "very fluent". Personally, I don't speak English at home because my mother can't speak it.

What has helped me improve in my English is the reading of lots and lots of books. I used to skip school to go to Borders to read (please go to school, kiddies), and I carried a pocket dictionary around just in case there was a word I didn't know. Whenever I had to write essays I would also strive to use the thesaurus as much as I can, so eventually, I got fluent.

[wordmaker82]

I used to learn English by remembering grammar rules, and it helped me to pass the exams. Presently, I learn english by impersonating sentences of native speakers (maybe), and it helps me to compose my posts on this discussion.

Words ending with letter

[MissMagicGirl]

I am swedish to I learned in school as a child. And my mom read a lot of english books for me at home so I would learn more words. I still have some problems with grammar and spelling but I do my best. I almost only read books in english and watch english movies and shows. So I understand and read english perfectly but when it comes to speaking it my self I still lack som confidence. ^_^;;

My comic is also published in swedish. Magic Advisor in swedish is called Magikonsult.

I made this silly comic when I began to translate the story ^^;;