My native language is Portuguese (Brazilian)
When I was a child, my English was horrible (my English test too). My parents put me in a English learning school, and I studied there for 3 years. Plus I started exploring computers since I was 4, started to listen to music in english 12 hours per day and playing american video games since I was 13. I'm not fluent, but now I can talk english freely, and I can't stop listening to music... XD
Now I'm studying Japanese... (learning kanji is hard >.<)
reading manga online and playing multyplayers lol
it was the late 99 beginning of 2000, in less than a month i did better than 6 years of eng @ school
Russian here!
Well, I'm studying English since I was three. Started with a group for pre-schoolers, then in school I had a deepened course and later I started to, you know, talk to English-speaking people online + movies, music and book in English because some interesting stuff is hard to find in Russian.
So...I speak pretty much fluently...I guess?
I learned English by crawling around the floor as a baby and listening to my English-speaking parents, school helped a bit too. I also learned all of my swear words from my older sisters and television.
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Sorry, that was dumb. Carry on. XP
The power of videogames is so strong, that combined with songs and reading books or articles that I liked were my main choices. Aside from basic mandatory lessons in school (they're not really helpful tho)...
But the most important thing was my motivation to learn, I wanted to speak english, to understand what those characters on screen were saying, so it's not that I bought books to teach me, I just read, played and listened to things I loved in english, that way I learned without even noticing it.
Also watching movies/series without subs is really good, I mean, training your ear is very important and also fun. Accents are everywhere.
I was a mix of cartoons and speaking to my grandfather. I'm Puerto Rican, but my grandfather from my mother's side is a Slovakian immigrant from New York City (back in the 1930's). He met my grandmother (who is Puerto Rican) there and they moved to the island.
So my mother comes from an English-speaking household and since she raised me more than my Spanish-speaking family, I was just in constant exposure to it. I sometimes get both mixed up and speak a lot of Spanglish, though...
I had a lot of british friends when I was in Spain so I kinda learnt it by osmosis lol.
I don't really know how I learnt it, I was with my english speaking friends and I absorbed it, I never actually studied it.
Then I moved to to England 2 years ago. I started studying a bit of proper grammar, wasn't that hard.
I think english is the easiest language to learn(That's why everybody in the world studies english). The actually hard part to master is to understand what other people is trying to say when you talk in real life.
The actually hard part to master is to understand what other people is trying to say when you talk in real life.
Totally agree.
So, to improve that, I've just started to listen some English podcasts (it's kinda funny, cause I'm usually walking down the street with the mp3 player in one hand and continuously rewinding the "tricky" parts or the ones that I didn't hear properly).
I'm Australian, so English is my mother tongue, but the good thing about it is, I also know American and British through movies, TV and books. Yeah, I know they're just dialects and not languages in and of themselves, but it's still a cool thing, especially when you realise that lots of Americans have no idea about Australian English. There are literally thousands of words, sayings and idioms unique to my homeland that you can only really learn by living here, whereas I've learned a plethora of Americanisms and Britishisms throughout my life simply through media exposure.
Example, take this:
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!
No one actually talks like that, but it's still perfectly understood by any Aussie. How'd y'all go?
I lived in Australia for a few years when I was little and I spoke virtually no english when we moved. If you ever want a challenge, try picking up a new language in a place where they talk in thick accents. My mum was so frustrated that she didn't understand anything anyone was saying for the first few weeks we were there and she spoke perfect english!
And I'm so relieved I'm not the only one who suffers from the "seen the word many times but can't pronounce it" problem. I pronounced melancholy mellon-cho-lee until my sister finally corrected me. She reads good, you see.
Bloody oath they are! I have a pretty standard Aussie accent, not at all broad like Paul Hogan or Steve Irwin.
When my partner moved here she had real trouble with the accent. Fair enough too, English was her third or fourth language. Now she's dinki di
I'll never forget her face when one of my mates with a really thick accent drawled out at her, "Sowareaboutsyafrom?"
My basics I picked up in school, although English has always been by far my worst subject. I hate learning languages in a school system, Math and Physics were much more my thing. When I was nearly done with school, I was barely able to use basic English, I doubt I would have survived anywhere outside Germany.
Then I happened to run into a US soldier. I learned a lot from him. After we married and he went on deployments to Afghanistan, I played way too much World of Warcraft. My guild was on an American server, and I enjoyed chatting and skyping with them a lot.
So... I learned English from gamers and soldiers. Needless to say, I find it hard not to curse constantly.
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.
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 ; )
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)
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. 
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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/
@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.
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.
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.
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 ^^
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.
Mostly through video games and reading since in school it is taught poorly, you learn more by your own.
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 
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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.
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.
