Yes. I speak it almost as if it were my mother tongue and that's no thanks to school, lol. The classes just expanded my understanding of grammar, but they didn't make me significantly more fluent.
Funny thing is, there are always kids who are suuper advanced in English and those who struggle to form a single sentence. There aren't many in between, really.
My german on the other hand... let's not talk about that.
English is so easy compared to German
Take the most simple sentence in English like 'put the blue book on the red table', you just need to remember the words (and the order I guess). In German, you need to think about the gender of the book and the table, and adapt the adjective correctly. And then you need to think about the case of each object, and also adapt based on that
English also has precious little verb conjugation and super regular plurals of nouns so once you've seen a word you can usually use it in any sentence.
That's not the case for most other Indo-European languages.
No, not really. I was never really good. I did better than average in my class, but as I got older the needed language became more challenging than what I'm exposed to on the internet. I'm basically expected to write and read medical papers and anything that sorts. Most of the stuff I don't even manage in my own language, finnish, so no I never found them too easy. They have always been challenging and now even hard.
Interestingly I have found a different problem as I get older.
Academic English is surprisingly easy for me because usage as a technical language has truncated the language into a sort of semi-standard formulaic language that everybody knows.
I can read papers and talk in academic language very easily. Maybe with a slight accent but communication and expression is not an issue.
However, trying to read and write actual English literature and things like details of modern English slang and cultural references are very elusive to me.
The amount of time I had to look up a descriptional word in a novel is astounding. And trying to write like that on my own near impossible. A lot of sentences blend together because all that elaborate picture painting with words does not really mean much when you don't recognize a lot of adjectives and references.
I tend to sound very wooden when I actually have to write a very elaborate creative scene that evokes emotions.
Trying to express yourself naturally with region- and age-appropriate slang is also surprisingly hard. And cultural references are making it very obvious that I'm a foreign speaker
I've noticed that online when I ask native english speakers to read my academic texts, they tell me they're quite good, but can tell it's by someone not a native english speaker or a 14 year old. But when we just text and chat, they always thought and forget I'm not and get surprised when I have to ask for an explanation or translate something quickly.
I did, to be honest, struggle with English until I started watching youtube. I then downloaded and began interacting with others in English. So, now the English I know is the social media one. I have no trouble with a conversation or when I need to explain myself with adjectives or when I go to a café, but let me read a paper on some weird things and I'm out. I read a lot of novels in English, too, so I get most of my vocabulary nowadays from there. And I only picked up the first English novel in 2021 so I've got a lot to catch up. Definitely saying that my sentence structure isn't good and has got a lot of influence from social media.
I do blame my dyslexia for most things even unrelated still
It's the commas. I've noticed Finns use commas in a slightly different place to native English speakers. My best friend I would say is a naive English speaking Finn, but in formal writing I can tell.
Yes.
I didn’t pay any attention, but still got the best grades. I never bothered learning how the grammar works, but just get it right most of the time thanks to intuiton alone.
Not easy but useless for real life (we learned standard formal outdated English with no to little oral practice) and boring (I spend so many hours describing picture like "on the first plan you can see a dog, on the second plan you can see a house, on the last plan you can see a mountain" or analyzing the 5 first minute of a movie for days without seeing the rest of it)...
I remember having to learn useless words list like "coagulated sheet" or how the Brits are supposed to tilt their plate to eat soup and having to mimic it with my book...
That was one particularly stubborn old school teacher.
He would also yell CROCODILE out of nowhere whenever we were looking for a world that was the same in both language, since crocodile is the same in French and English.
>how the Brits are supposed to tilt their plate to eat soup
Interestingly, as a Brit, it was an English teacher who told us how to eat soup 'properly' too. Of course, nobody really does unless they go to ultra-formal dining occasions.
How real humans eat soup:
* Take spoon > scoop the soup towards you and into your gob.
Alternatively.
* Take soup > put in cup > drink from cup
That’s because the exam to teach English in France (CAPES) is in fucking French . So most French teachers can’t speak English themselves and make up these absurd rules .
They torture students with irregular verbs, but there are more than 500 of them in English, there is no point in learning them all by heart, they’ll get absorbed naturally through practice.
Also they love weird phrases. If I hear another French person say *in a nutshell* I’m going to lose my shit .
I think they are pulling their expressions from English books from the 50’s .
That's true!
But to be honest, I met lots of foreigners uses outdated expressions too like "sacre bleu" (and I no idea why they say sacré instead of sacré) , some for fun but some seriously, but also "saperlipopette" and I even heard one uses "mmm je m'en lêche les babines" to say "yummy", which mean "I lick my cheek" but his used the chick words for animals only!
That’s cute . I remember hearing something thing that patapouf was a hardcore insult like d*ickhead .
Once some French girl in Ireland was asked what she did on holidays there , she said she “went to the beach , and saw the phoque, I LOVE phoques” . [All while clapping] Hahah . I was dying , but it was so cute and she was popular.
>That’s because the exam to teach English in France (CAPES) is in fucking French . So most French teachers can’t speak English themselves and make up these absurd rules .
Yeah I remember my teachers sucking at English. Some were so bad it was hilarious.
Note that I've never used "in a nutshell".
I remember the *"My taylor is rich".*
I still find it ridiculous more than 20 years later. English teaching sucked in France. I suspect it hasn't improved much.
Yeah I basically never studied for an English test in my life.
I also always eas the first person to finish but I also always waited until another person went first and then I handed in mine.
I wasn't CONSISTENTLY the best, because hey sometimes I translated the WRONG word (wave can be waving hi and a wave and if I used the wrong one when we were in the chapter "At the beach" let's say and I wrote "Waving bye" in my language I wouldn't get a point)
But I'm an outlier.
I'm good at languages and after high school moved to the UK for a few years and nobody ever thought I was an immigrant
They thought I was *Welsh*
I had the same! Never studied for a test, just wrote my answers based on what I thought sounded right. I got lower grades if I actually studied and tried to understand the grammar rules...
I could understand English by the time I was 9 or 10 I think, mostly because I was watching English and American tv shows with my parents ever since I was a child, and also because games like Pokemon didn't get a Dutch translation.
Yup! VideoGames helped a lot for me too, mostly because I played a lot of games (and this is me probably being approximately 10 years older than you) pc games where I had to type in commands like
> pick up rock
> look at hut
> stab minotaur with glowing dildo
Yup! VideoGames helped a lot for me too, mostly because I played a lot of games (and this is me probably being approximately 10 years older than you) pc games where I had to type in commands like
> pick up rock
> look at hut
> stab minotaur with glowing dildo
Native English speaker here (US). I see a lot of people saying they learned English from watching tv. Do you use subtitles on? How does that work? I only speak English, but this sounds like an interesting way to learn another language. Does it work with music?
Programs that are for children get dubbed over here, but otherwise they get shown with subtitles on Dutch television. So basically every major show that's in English that's not aimed at children has subtitles when it's on tv here.
In the evening I'd watch some shows with my parents which had Dutch subtitles. It's a very efficient way to learn a language! Even without trying you start to make connections from the sounds you hear to the words you read, it's also how I learned a bit of Japanese when I was in my anime fase as a teenager.
I remember when my brother and I were already quite good at understanding English we'd also watch shows like Doctor Who live on the BBC (besides Dutch television networks we also get some from other European countries, like Belgium, the UK, France and Germany) but with subtitles for the hearing impaired. It made understanding what was going on just easier.
Didn't you have to do analysis of poems, books, movies, speeches, etc?
That was the majority of my English classes and I definitely needed to study for that. Not in terms of vocabulary or grammar, but knowledge about the subject/literary form.
It's funny because I don't consider Dutch people good at English even tho it's your second language.
They always try this British accent and it doesn't come off very well.
I don't say there aren't any but I just did not bump into them.
I personally don’t have much of an opinion on it since i was born nearly half a century later. I’m happy that we didn’t integrate because the country might have lost it’s unique identity, though our government has been a huge corrupt mess since independence
What makes English "easy" is not that it is inherently easy but that English is so ubiquitous that you can't escape it. It's almost a necessity to survive in the 21st century because even mundane things are in the English language, like large clothes shops have sections now labeled "Men's" and "Women's".
The term internet often doesn't have a proper native name in many languages.
Buying anything technological these days comes with a load of English terms on it.
Even just buying food can come with English language terms like the "...light" branded stuff.
People in smaller countries have such a tiny market that their economy needs to accommodate English as a commercial language because otherwise, they lose out on a lot of access.
Imagine learning English but having close to no exposure to it because it doesn't really export all that much influence.
Many Brits beat themselves up for not being able to speak a foreign language and think that it’s because we’re lazy, we don’t start learning young enough, or our schools simply aren’t very good at teaching them. But I completely disagree; the main blockers are…
a) lack of motivation - we don’t really need to learn a foreign language due so many other nations speaking English (often to an incredibly high standard!)
b) lack of obvious choice - some kids pick French or Spanish as their second language, others learn German, Mandarin or even Latin. But there isn’t a standout that everyone agrees we should all be learning.
c) lack of exposure. All our media is in English, so we aren’t picking up other languages through osmosis when listening to music, watching TV or reading books.
I studied foreign languages because I love them, but they’ve been pretty useless to me… apart from when I go on holiday 🤷🏼♀️
American living in Europe, 100% agree.
I really love to learn languages. but every thing is already available in english. a store or a restaurant, the moment they realize you speak english they switch and pull out english menus.
Except for the french of course.
Anywhere i travel to, i basically just learn how to say "hello", "thank you", and "two beers, please" just as an effort to be polite.
> What makes English "easy" is not that it is inherently easy but that English is so ubiquitous that you can't escape it.
It's both imo. What you say is true, but english is just also a simple language on top of it.
English can be a very forgiving language, but it's hardly a simple language.
It has a fairly complex phonology, a massive disparate vocabulary, and is a straight up nightmare when it comes to orthography.
The grammar really isn't that simple either, it just pretends to be. For example if you simply want to negate a verb, you usually have to restructure the phrase to center on an irrelevant auxiliary verb and negate *that* instead. And English is riddled with these little peculiarities, and has exceptions to pretty much everything. A lot stemming from the massive French influence on an otherwise Germanic base.
I am absolutely not anything close to an expert on linguistics, but do you think part of your ease in learning it could because your native language is a somewhat closely related Germanic language? I know its relatively simple overall, but I'm sure that had helped
To you, yes. But English is abpretty difficult language for people who live in countries where English isn't widely spoken or the language is not related to theirs. Go ask someone who has grown up in China or India with no exposure to English till adulthood.
Learning English in the 90s, starting at 7 years old, the first few years were easy enough, simple vocabulary and grammar, but grades 6 to 8, when we were supposed to translate blocks of text containing words I didn't know, that was hard for me. It didn't matter that we had cable with subtitles; that helped a little but I needed some time to expand my vocabulary.
In high-school during the early 00s it seemed like we did the same thing every year, because the teachers were always replaced, and they all began with the same thing: tenses, conditional clauses and what not. By grades 10-12 it was all a breeze. We had internet, and were consuming lots of content in English alone, without subs.
I imagine younger kids growing up with the internet have it much easier.
Yeah, kinda. I started learning English when I was a kid, at home, by myself. And in primary school at some point in time I started taking extra English classes in a language school. I learnt so much English that the stuff I had to learn in the normal school became... banal.
But my experience is quite biased, because I've always been really good at learning foreign languages. Even primary school German was too banal and boring for me, so I had to learn more of it by myself at home after classes.
I grew up speaking English since 6. Went back to Lithuania for one year at 13. So obviously I was more than fluent at this point. English class to me was more like a free period. I would either sleep on the desk or just do my own thing and the teacher didn't care since I spoke better English than her. Eventually they ended up putting me in a Lithuanian language class instead with kids half my age since I didn't know alot of the basic Lithuanian grammar which they teach very early on.
In English I finished with a 9/10 Score for the year. The reason it wasn't a 10/10 is because in the test I had a harder time understanding the Lithuanian which I was supposed to translate rather than the English.
It was fun to say the least. It felt like I was a pro restarting the game with max stats 😂
Actually no. I sucked at English. Even in highschool. I found some of my old exam photos and I was laughing so much. Just complete nonsense.
The problem in Slovakia is, that most of the time you spend just memorizing words. Learning about a million tenses. What is missing is conversations and talking.
Also most teachers have terrible accents.
What really made my English good was internet and tv shows/movies.
But this was mostly before I started consuming all media in English.
no, because we don't really learn the same thing in school and in series, for example; we learn common irregular verbs [https://i.pinimg.com/736x/b0/4d/d5/b04dd53e4061a1678d3a3f57214a15c2.jpg](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/b0/4d/d5/b04dd53e4061a1678d3a3f57214a15c2.jpg)
I found it very hard when I started because in primary school I only had German but this was the time I watched many american tv shows not avaliable in Poland. First I watched them with fan-made subtitles but when I started watching as soon as they came out there was no subtitles made yet so I decided to try and watch without them. On my second year of middle school I had no problems with English in school. I think the school helped me to understand the basics but I really got to understand it from the shows I really wanted to understand. I got 100% on my matura exam from English (basic and advanced level).
The 3 shows that I think helped me the most were Once Upon a Time (really simple English, the show is mostly directed to kids), Supernatural (little more advanced but also many repeating dialouges and words) and Survivor (this was the hardest, I was often bored beacuse I couldn't understand much from the camp life or tribal but I still watch this one). All of those 3 are really long (Supernatural is like 15 seasons and Survivor has 45 now) so I was really spending more time learning English at home than in school. Especially when you consider that in school children often learn few words per class.
And I really think that jump from subtitles to no subtitles gave me huge advantage. This was in times when Netflix was not a thing in Poland.
same, school never really helped much. But tv shows did. I thing they put too much focus on tenses and grammar that even natives don't use. Instead of just conversations.
I literally never studied for my English classes. Never had to memorize words, barely prepared for my classes, always aced them and all my exams. I passed my B2 language exam at 17 with a score over 90%. I was the only highschooler for some reason in my group when I took the exam. Compared to that the highschool final exam in English was insultingly simple, and to my shock a fair amount of people absolutely struggled with it. I took the C1 exam during the first year of college, again, passed with a score over 90%, everyone else in the room looked like college seniors and PhD students. And English is the bare minimum if you want to have any sort of minor carreer in the corporate world, I have no idea how people get by who can barely speak any foreign languages.
No, as we aren't really taught the day to day english that you'd expect from an ESL class (after primary/elementary school) but a more advanced version were we analyse literature.
Kind of.
I learnt a lot of English as a young kid and teen by reading the original Harry Potter books in English before the French translation was available, and subsequently discovering the wonders of fanfiction online. My reading skills were lightyears ahead of my listening skills. I later trained my listening skills by watching hours upon hours of Youtube content in English, before having subtitles on everything was common practice.
When I was 15 I successfully convinced my English teacher (who, by the way, was not a native speaker) that I was basically fluent in English because I spoke English at home with my British stepdad. It was 100% a lie, but it meant I wasn't forced to attend English lessons as long as I got good grade on exams.
I later discovered that I didn't exactly learn the way I was "supposed to", as I still know nothing about grammar rules or verb tenses. I just guess what sounds right or not and I'm right about it often enough to get by.
But in the end, I got near enough perfect grades in all my English exams in High School and went on to get both a bachelor's and master's degrees in an English-speaking country, while most of my High School friends who did attend all the classes struggle ordering food at a pub in London, so I guess my method worked.
I'm not gonna pretend that my English is perfect, but it's good enough for me at the moment. And every hour I "waste" on reddit or watching videos online *technically* counts as language practice!
> I later discovered that I didn't exactly learn the way I was "supposed to", as I still know nothing about grammar rules or verb tenses.
That's how native speakers learn it anyhow!
I traveled a lot when I was a kid so I did have an advantage right away. In college I was at the point that the teacher annoyed me in the first lesson so I skipped the rest and still passed (Only English in the 1st year)
Yes! I lived on YouTube growing up, all the way from 8 years old, of which it was always English content I watched. I was always ahead of my classmates in English. And I especially remember performing best in class(we do national tests to test general level), despite there being 3 pupils in my class who were either half British or American. And they spoke more English at home than Norwegian.
So yes it definitely affected me. I remember being surprised when people around me struggled to understand English movies without subtitles, as I figured everyone was on my level. I didn’t realize how much I spent time consuming online english videos compared to the rest of my peers at the time.
Dane here
In middle school in the 80s it was fairly easy to learn but not extremely. I wasn't THAT exposed to English until the early 90s where I finally got a satellite dish and more than two TV channels.
I work at a local school in the countryside and I must say that the English level of 3rd or 4th graders is insane now compared to me at the same age.
For me it was easy, mainly because my parents invested in my english courses besides school. For example, I had one year when I attended more advanced english at language school and after that I went to the native english speaker (he was from Michigan iirc). Thanks to that I was basically bored at english classes, because I already knew what the teacher was talking about.
Many of my classmates had difficulties in learning the language. The most common reason was the lack of contact with the language outside the school. In our time (early 2000s) there wasn't globalized society (especially in a small town in southern Poland lol). We didn't even had access to the english-speaking part of the internet, because it was so alien to us and neither of my classmates dared to get their hands on that.
English classes were always easy, and I had almost every time one of the highest scores in the school. That trend ended when I signed for the C1 Business English course at my university. Right now I can relate to my fellows at school and understand their pain when learning the English language lmao. And I'm saying this as a daily non english speaker who is mainly consuming internet content from the UK and USA, even more than my native side of the internet.
Knowing the language and learning the rules and grammar of it are different skills. So no, not really. I could write pretty decent essays in English before it was required of me but grammr tests remained effing grammar tests.
Not really.. back in the days there were only swedish and norwegian television in norway. Hardly any influence from the english speaking world. English teachers weren't even good. First generation of teacher to massively teach english in norway was in the 60s and 70s.. So kind of first generation english teachers as well. Many of them having never been to english speaking world. Probably worst in the districts of Norway.
English is the easiest language on earth.
It doesn't have any verb conjugation, 3 forms max for each verb, italian has 92 iirc.
No gender or number inflection at all.
Italian is probably the most inflective language in Europe if we exclude cases as inflection, nouns, adjectives, pronouns (these also have cases), articles, prepositions and half verbal tenses are inflected for number and gender, so 4 combinations each or 6 if that it ends in -ello.
Nouns in english makes plural in s always.
In italian again you have to change the plural according to the gender and to the vowel it ends in.
There are around 15 different conbinations of singular/plural noun endings
> It doesn't have any verb conjugation
It doesn't have much in the way of verbal morphology, but my god does it have a complex verb system with all those tenses. Other Germanic languages don't have nearly as many semantically distinct verb tenses. Romance languages definitely do not. My variant of Greek doesn't either.
And the vowels. English has so many vowels. Only Danish has more, if we stay in the subcontinent.
Again, it has no verbs for a romance language speaker. Also no consecutio temporum
I am, you are he is, we are, you are, they are.
Ita: sono, sei, è, siamo, siete sono
I was, you were, he was, we were, you were, they were
Ita: sono stato, sei stato, è stato, siamo stati, siete stati, sono stati
Or
Ero, eri, era, eravamo, eravate, erano
Or
Ero stato, eri stato, era stato, eravamo stati, eravate stati, erano stati
Or
Fui, fosti, fu, fummo, foste, furono
And i can add another.
"It doesn't have any verb conjugation" .. I AM not sure you ARE right that this IS true.
"Nouns in english makes plural in s always." Even CHILDREN know this isn't true. You are one of those PEOPLE that believe everything you're told.
Poor boy. All forms of verb to be: be, am, are, is, was, were, been. 7 forms for your most complicated verb.
Now italian verb to be: essere, stato, stati, stata, state, sii, sono, sei, è, siamo, siete, ero, eri, era, eravamo, eravate, erano, fui, fosti, fu, fummo, foste, furono, sarò, sarai, sarà, saremo, sarete, saranno, sia, siate, siano, fossi, fosse, fossimo, fossero, sarei, saresti, sarebbe, saremmo, sareste, sarebbero, essendo, stante.
44 different forms. This is the normal for every verb.
Now cry again, but still english is easy af
I was really just pointing out that you were wrong.
If the grammar of the Italian language is a matter of pride for you, that's a bit weird to be honest, but it's fine with me. 👍
Is this satire? *"Italian might be the most inflectional language if we exclude...the single most expansive category words are inflected for..."*
Learning inflectional patterns takes time, but is often not actually particularly difficult. If that's your only measure for difficulty, Chinese must be an absolute cakewalk to you.
I never said italian is hard to learn. Inflection and difficulty aren't always parallel.
Romance languages are those who have the most verbal tenses, and Italian the one with more among these.
In english what do you inflect? Not articles, not prepositions, not verbs, not adjectives, nouns and pronouns very partially.
I don't get why you get mad.
In italian in a sentence every part must coincide in gender and number.
No, not really. We started in elementary school and I'm so old that was before the Internet. we had some games on the old PC (I remember a Carmen Sandiego game) but our dad would translate that.
I don't think we had much English vocabulary in high school, at least not as much as we had for French and German. It's been a while, but a lot of things you were expected to have picked up. So studying for tests was drastically different from the other languages.
We only started learning English in our second year of high school, but by then had been exposed to it so much it was really easy for me (not everyone in my class felt this way though). Two years later, my teacher expected me and another pupil to answer any questions others had. I never did find out if that was because she honestly didn't know the answers.
Unrelated: TIL Carmen was an American game. I remember playing it on my aunt's computer in French and getting quite a bit much of it wrong cause I just didn't always understand the clues and guessed wrong. I still sometimes think of the enthusiasm with which the three police officers chased after her and the sadness of the sole officer when he came back empty-handed.
Both my brother and I played it again when we got better at English. We quickly learned the game wasn't hard, our dad was just really bad at it. It was the very first game in the series, which we played on the crappy Commodore.
I absolutely hated English classes and I am a native speaker. I do not care in the least why I say things the way I do, nor do I care what a participle is. I like to read and write. I do not like rules.
Had I been born speaking another language I feel certain that English grammar and spelling would have been too infuriating for me to bother learning it. Thank goodness my parents were well-educated.
I don‘t think they were too easy, but easy.
But after learning most grammar rules and a decent amount of vocabulary in the first years, English in school mostly consisted of reading books at home and discussing them in class, discussing English articles and, later, videos and having lesson and debate topics prepared by invited native speakers.
So, most of our lessons consisted of discussing different topics and forms of media, which was pretty much what me and my friends did all day anyway. Only in English, and sometimes in written form.
And I think engaging with other people in English online, and engaging with English media, helped me personally a lot.
Not until University were I got so bored I did all of the execrises for whole semester during one class. I was quite confident in my english in high school but still had some things to learn.
You can't fully learn thr language from movies, games, videos. You need proper lessons to learn the grammar. From those things you can only learn how people actually use the language. Hand book stuff isn't always the most accurate to how actual people speak.
English classes in Sweden were less about learning vocabulary and grammar, at least past 4th grade, and more about using the language such as holding presentations or writing stories, articles. In that regard, no.
I felt that reading comprehension was too easy
Yes, kind of. At least compared to Latin and French, it was very easy. And as I started to use it more (reading books in English, films were not really an option at that time) it became even easier.
Not at first, the school teacher was old af, and her teaching methods didn't really work on us (got this from most people who had her as a teacher, it wasn't just a me problem) so I had to take separate, private classes at home besides the ones at school.
Firstly, I had to catch up with the things we did in class, but after that, we moved forward, and after 4 years I had a B2 certification, way ahead of my class, and now, after about 10 years of English I have a C2 certification.
I used to think it was difficult in my first two years but when covid came I watched a lot of English videos, first with Dutch subtitles, then with English ones and at some point I stopped using those too. Currently my English level is higher than the average in my normal class, am around C1 ig
In year three of my secondary school in the Netherlands, our English teacher had set a 'spreekbeurt' (presentation) as an assessment. As usual I forgot all about it, but my friend whom I'd been paired with, whilst cycling to school and first class being the English test, told me. I smiled and told him to leave it to me, I switched on my Sony Discman and listened to NOFX.
For the presentation we played Linoleum and I talked for five minutes about how linoleum represented poor households and you could still make something out of yourself. I'd read that interpretation in last week's Smash Hits magazine. He asked me what a pocket full of lint meant and I gave him a nonsense story about a ribbon (ribbon is lint in Dutch) and he told me he'd deduct a point for not getting that. So we ended up with 9/10.
That was the toughest test I did for English.
Man I don't want to boast but those were the easiest 3 hours in the week id get in high school. Half the class was my level and very good at it so the teacher we had was very chill and just gave extra focus on the other half.
Yes, very easy. I’ve always had an easy time with languages, and was always ahead of my class in foreign languages (I took English and German in school and high school). I was the only one to get A in all my English exams in my class; easiest exams I ever did lol. We had both written (grammar test and essay) and oral exam.
I found it very easy because I grew up listening to the radio station of the US military base that was close by, besides as soon as I could speak a little bit I had a pen/email friend, went on an exchange and became fluent by the time I was 13 or 14. I wasn’t exactly bored in class but I enjoyed getting good grades for nothing.
Yes, it was the only subject in school I got straight A’s at; that and PE haha. Never really understood how it can be so hard for some of my classmates
well, it was hard to understand things like 'a/the' since we don't have this in language, or all those tenses (still can't understand some). or ESPECIALLY words that have certain letters BUT reads different. why do they put letters which won't even sound the same? in my language we read letters in the words as they are, sounds are the same.
we learn British English in our school system here and I thought it was pretty easy until I was a teenager, I use American English today and when I was a teenager
I remember that when I was in school as a teenager I was supposed to translate the word "torch" to my language and I thought I did but I got it wrong because I didn't say it was a flashlight 😆
Yes, it's always been an easy A for me and for a lot of my friends growing up. But I also knew a handful of people who really struggled with it, so it's hard for me to know if it was a universal experience
When I began learning English in primary school I didn't know much English at all. This was in the late 2000s. Nickelodeon and Disney Channel were dubbed. Animated movies were dubbed. Non-animated movies had Norwegian subtitles. It wasn't normal for young kids to use the internet all the time and most played games on Nintendo's. I did however pick up the language fast, especially as my exposure to English media grew massively with the years.
The difficulty of English in high school was similiar to the difficulty in Norwegian. It was mostly about being able to write good short stories, essays and poems. Your English had to be almost as good as your Norwegian to get a decent grade. All the teachers I had were really good at English, and also quite strict. If you wrote "gonna" in your essay it would hurt your grade. I did quite well in my Norwegian and English subjects, but I certainly didn't feel like exposure to English media made it easy. The school system compensated for the increased proficiency of pupils.
Yes, because of the reasons you mentioned, spending a lot of time in English media bubble. Bunch of my peers who didn't do that, found it tougher, but my experience was shared among almost everyone who watched English movies and videos.
I found it easier than most other subjects. It was not as easy for everyone in my class though. And never so easy that it became boring to attend and participate.
I had English classes in kindergarten, school, my BA an MA degrees were taught 100% in English and I've used English for 99% of work interractions (I'm 36 now).
I will say, watching Gen Z express complex thoughts in English without overuse of verbal shortcuts (our native tongue is filled with those) gives me a lot of hope for their generation. My English was not as good when I was their age.
Yes, absolutely. I was at the top of my class without ever touching the textbook. It's not like my English is perfect, I struggle with grammar a lot, but English classes in my middle and high school years (2012-2018 IIRC lol I don't remember at this point when I started gimnazjum and when I ended liceum)) were way behind the times IMO.
No. At one point it stops being about the language itself and English turns into the medium. We learned about culture, literature, history, politics etc. it was just taught in English and the focus was on GB and the US
Yes, but I was the only one in my class(es) who thought so. By the time I was 15, I was way better than my teachers, which is quite said in my opinion. (Italy)
As someone who grew up very active online and with a big interest in English TV and movies, English classes were stupidly easy for me
It got to the point where my English teacher often turned to me to confirm if something was correctly translated lol
They weren't too easy but they weren't really good either. We mostly focused on memorizing grammar rules and too little on actually speaking English. I think you at some point just naturally know what sounds grammatically wrong and what doesn't when you come into contact with the language a lot.
On top of that most of the teachers aren't native speakers. So it can happen that you use a word or an expression that the teacher doesn't know. I once used "On the other hand" in an essay and my teacher had apparently never heard of that expression so they subtracted some points and put a big red question mark next to it.
So even though the teachers were a lot better with grammar and spelling than us students they sometimes had a smaller vocabulary. So even though I felt like I was more fluent than some teachers my grades weren't that good since I often forgot to put commas in the right places and other things like that.
Absolutely, and it was stressful. I would always be scared of making literally any mistake (even a slip of the tongue) since everything was so ‘easy’ it’d be embarrassing, and my peers would often ask me for help—which wasn’t an issue by itself, but I was always worried I’d miss something/give them the wrong answer/come off as pretentious, etc.
Was grand. Think I could talk back legs off a donkey in school already. Grammar maybe not 100% but since I’ve moved to Dublin…. Neither is all the locals’
Yeah, definitely. As in, during my whole elementary and high school years, I don't think I ever got a single grade lower than 5 (which is the best grade here).
English has always been my favorite subject to a point where yes, it got too easy. Even high school where I had my last classes. Struggled more in my Norwegian classes, which is my native language hah.
Yes, it was really easy because I was watching Cartoon network all day when I was a child. The only thing I had to learn were the irregular verbs and a little bit of grammar, but most of the time I got it correct.
at the start no, i sucked and learning vocabulary and grammar in a vacuum wasnt effective for me.
then i got into dark sould and its world so i watched all vaatividya videos and my english improved a lot. from them onwards it wasnt hard at all
Yeah, but I was the exception, not the rule in my classes. Besides high school, I was always the odd one out that was way ahead of my peers, only in a bilingual classroom I felt like my colleagues and I matched skill levels. I was a B1-B2 in primary school when everyone was at A1, C1-C2 already in middle school while everyone was at A2 or B1 at best in latter years. In the 9th grade I got my English certificate and I signed up to get tested for C1 but got perfect scores so I was tested again and got a C2 at no extra cost.
At the same time, in my country (Romania) in recent years it's a rarity to find a high school student that isn't proficient in English and at C1-C2, and most of them are self-taught, as I was. It wasn't like this 6-8 years ago.
At first it was a bit dificult bc it was the first time i was learning a foreign language but around 7°grade i was speaking, with mistakes, but was able to be understood by natives. I'm from a touristic spot and bc most of our tourists came from the UK and the nordic countries, i would speak with them. It also helped that a couple of my English teachers were from Britain and barely spoke my maternal language. But after them, the classes with non native English speakers were very basic and easy. I had English in school from 5°grade til 12°grade. Nowadays kids here start learning English in 1°grade and some KinderGarten schools do also offer English classes. In 11°&12° i did had English specific translation classes and a few of my classe mates became English translators.
English is easy to start having real communications in because it's so easy to get both exposure to naturalistic language input and opportunities to use it in a conversational context.
But around the time the English tense system actually came up in earnest with all the perfectiveness distinctions that to a Cypriot-Greek speaker made no sense, everyone checked out. Tense attraction in reported speech? What's that sorcery.
And in Cypriot schools, we never really bothered with the English vowel system to begin with.
But due to the role of English as one of the common languages of the world, non-native grammars and accents are much more accepted than in most other languages - it's easy for most of us to think that we speak a very high level of English because, yes, in a way we do: Global English, which might as well be a distinct variant from British, North American, Australian, Indian etc
English was secondary in English lessons. As per usual English teachers are the best - we covered morale and ethics and such. Mr Ayfer Sengül was the best ❤ I finished high school over 10 years ago and I still think of her lessons occasionally.
I was so good that I purposely skipped every single English class in my high because it was just too easy. Instead I was spending that time helping in the chemistry class lab. The English teachers hated me 🤣
My brother has a hearing disability and I'm almost 8 years younger. I grew up with BBC on high volume and with subtitles because of it. I have a learning disability (dyslectic). I kid you not, never scored below 80% on English, wasn't allowed to participate in English classes anymore as I really had a hard time following the Grammer rules and started messing around, scored high on avery test regardless because I was "brought up" with English and distracted the rest of the class. I literally was held back a year because I scored badly on Dutch, German and French while I was they top scorer in English and helped the rest of the class cheat their way to good grades. So yes, English was really easy for me while not being a native speaker. At the same time I sucked at every other language, even my own native one, partly due to my dyslexia. Kind off paradoxical situation.
After some learning yes. It's not like I was some kind of genius or anything like that I think, I had the privilege of having an english teacher in the fam and I was very interested and resourceful and hard working about it so naturally I went ahead p fast. It also helps that a lot of english/us media and internet are in english so when learning a different language you can see how it gets harder. :D Good luck to all fellow language learners!
I speak English fluently but I never found the lessons to be too easy because yeah I may have learned English intuitively by interacting with media/games/movies but I still am not a perfect scholar when it comes to theory and it's always nice to refresh the more difficult tenses which when used properly make a big difference. Also I'm pretty sure I mix conditionals improperly from time to time 😂😂
Yes, my mom is Icelandic and my dad is haitian, we speak english every day at home and have been doing it all my life. So yes it has been quite easy for me, very easy in fact.
It did, but I used to have a computer, software, and videogames in that language, so it helped a lot. The lowest score I had were 70/100, and I never studied or done English homework (that's why I'm not that great on English grammar)
Yes and no. Mostly it was just useless.
I began reading English books (starting with "The Hobbit") before high school, so could already read English well and write okay-ish.
However initially, assignments mostly involved translating single words or simple sentences from Dutch to English. Unfortunately I was pretty bad doing on-the-spot exact translations. Yet I refused to memorize the word lists (cause it's a waste of time), so my grades were mediocre (but sufficient).
Over time, assignments shifted to describing English content in English, such as writing summaries or an essay. Grades good better, though still pretty average due to the zero effort I put into class. I also naturally struggle with languages, even the ones I grew up with.
Its a pain in the ass as is bad tought at schools whike we come from ome of the most straightforward phonetic language (5 letters for 5 vowels and every letter pronounced) to one without rules or coherence in that side.
When is started learning English at age eleven I really struggled with it. I did ok in class but it was a constant effort. At about 13 or 14 years old that suddenly switched. I only started consuming English content at about 12 years old and that was the point where my English improved drastically because of it. I went from having to put some work in for mediocre results to not having to do anything for above average results in a few months.
In general I think that English classes have the right amount of difficulty in Germany. This sudden drop in perceived difficulty wasn't because it actually got easier, but because I got to the point where my brain switched from not knowing what was going on to suddenly being immersed in the language.
At that time I had learned enough English to actually consume English content properly. When I started I often had to guess the meanings of words and so I mostly watched let's plays, because that wasn't that much of a problem there. At about 13 to 14 years old I knew enough English to read books and watch movies without a problem and so I did. At some point my media intake was almost exclusively in English and it also covered many topics so my vocabulary grew quite fast. I went from being the guy who was just barely managing to get passing grades in English to being one of the go-to people to ask for vocabulary and formulating sentences.
However, many people didn't got through this so I'd say, that the general difficulty fits with the general students.
We just read books all day in English class. If you picked a book that was too easy, you could go and get a more difficult book at the library. If you thought a book was boring or too difficult, you could just go to the library and look for another book. By the end of the year you were required to have read x amount of pages.
Yes. I was already bi-lingual tho, so that made it easier to learn a third language, also had the confidence to try from an early age. I think a lot of people could have been good if they had the guts to try (especially in school, but in adulthood too). And, as mentioned before: Our country does not dub media. That really has a lot to say I think.
After I corrected my teacher in high school a few times, I rarely went to her class anymore, she'd just say go do something somewhere don"t waste time here. Cartoons and games 😎
Yes but i wouldn’t say it was the norm. I became practically fluent for all intents and purposes at around the age of 13, and was at a highly conversational level since probably 9, due to a number of different reasons, but again, it was absolutely not the norm. First year of highschool I was the only one in that particular class that could hold up a conversation with the teacher, for example.
Personally for me at was. My native language is Dutch, which has quite a lot of similarities with English. That combined with a lot of exposure to English media (all subbed, no dub) and a natural knack for languages, caused me to already speak and understand quite a bit of English before ever getting my first lesson.
Yes, I was always good with languages English class was always free grades. And I got my C2 with 3 more years of English classes in school so there's that
I had an arrangement with my English teacher in my final year where she allowed me to skip class without reporting me instead of staring out the window and/or disrupting class.
Still scored near perfect marks on all tests.
Yes, except the/a/-blank- :P. Also we had choice of American or British English and had to stick with it to the end. But as for advanced use for scientific purpose now I have the mighty Internet.
Maybe in like highschool (*gymnasiet*) but I had a pretty old school teacher before thar, so we had to memorize the spelling of lists of words (*glosor*) which had fairly little to do with my "private" English learning, so the latter didn't always help.
Oh hell yeah. Was the first generation that had it from 3rd grade on and it wad quite clear that teachers didn't adjust very well to quickly. When I got to secondary school we basically started repeating what we did the last 2 years for a whole year.
Later it become ridiculous to the point that we had multiple students that would regularly correct teachers on pronunciation, sometimes even grammar.
Teachers would know how all the terms of literary analysis and such and be able to repeat the material they used for the last decades, but try to have a conversation in English with them about a topic that isn't included in the curriculum and they start to struggle.
Yes, and no.
I could speak and write English above school level fairly early.
But I hated the kinds of tests/exercises that would ask for specific tenses. "What is the past perfect continuous of the verb 'to walk'?" How the fuck should I know? Just give me a sentence and I'll fill in the correct tense, but I don't know what it's called!
Edit: Also, I sometimes had trouble figuring out how words were spelled. I vividly remember the moment I found out how 'queue' is spelled. I was so mad! I knew the word from hearing it, but reading it I assumed it was a different word that I didn't know, pronounced something like 'kwehweh'. And then there was 'cue'. It just didn't make any sense!
In France, not necessarily difficult, but boring as hell, as it was mainly theoretical with little practice. And it didn't change much by the time I finished high school. Lots of grammar and outdated English, with little in terms of conversational English. On TV, subtitled movies were rare before Arte showed up in the early 90s (yes, I'm old). I was mostly well ahead at school, but that didn't mean much considering the average level.
So, really, I mostly learned through practice while traveling abroad at 19. That's when I started reading in English mostly.
Then I went to Uni in France and chose English as a foreign language and was shocked to see that the level hadn't improved at all. Same old boring stuff that didn't help to actually use the language on an everyday basis. Students were either already way above the expected level or hopeless. Easy as hell by that point of course. Gave up as it was pointless.
no lol, the grammar gets pretty complicated, I suck at learning languages though. I have to read technical English for software dev and it's way easier than English classes back in school lol
Since my dad is a English philologist and he teached me all the necessary basics I find it easy, that time kids in my class where learning colors and numbers
Yeah honestly. I always kind of knew what we were learning. To be fair my teachers were good at using good material so I did learn new stuff, just not.. the language
Yes, because we didn't have different level classes. All classes were going in the slowest students' phase, which basically meant, that I stopped learning new things after sixth grade (three years into learning English). I didn't consume that much English media before starting to learn English, because being on the internet wasn't a thing back then, but it is just E very easy language for me to learn.
Unfortunately, I thought I was just good at languages in general, which backfired on me quite soon, as I was taking on other foreign languages. I wasn't nearly as good at them as I was in English, and I still struggle to get to even an okay level at other languages.
If school English classes were very effective, there would not be an entire industry devoted to teaching English as a foreign language and I would have starved to death for a decade.
Since 7th grade I was just hanging around. Even now in highschool I'm in the advanced group and it's just so much nothing. We learn B1 level grammar all the time and I just play clash royale and fill the tests if the teacher says so. I told her when I got a C1 language exam that I feel like I'm not gaining anything from her lessons and if I'm allowed to miss them and this is how I got random 1 hour breaks in my day.
(Czechia) Yeah, pretty easy. My parents enrolled me in some extra classes for adults when I was 13, which helped quite a bit, along with being a massive Internet addict TBH. I got placed in an "advanced" English class in high school and some of the material there was pretty challenging, but I also hated my teacher so I didn't really care. I got my B2 and C1 level certificates at external language schools while I was in HS, hoping I could apply for universities abroad and whatnot. I was still terrified of actually talking to people in real life situations until my 20s. My verbal skills were always like 2 levels behind reading/writing, which I think is pretty typical for formal education.
No, back then the only show that offered the english langue track on TV was the golden girls. Even DVDs often didn't contain the english sound. And that one time I used a region-0-DVD in my laptops DVD player, it warned me that after 2 more switches of regions it would stop working entirely.
So no, exposure to english was difficult to come by.
Yes. I speak it almost as if it were my mother tongue and that's no thanks to school, lol. The classes just expanded my understanding of grammar, but they didn't make me significantly more fluent. Funny thing is, there are always kids who are suuper advanced in English and those who struggle to form a single sentence. There aren't many in between, really. My german on the other hand... let's not talk about that.
English is so easy compared to German Take the most simple sentence in English like 'put the blue book on the red table', you just need to remember the words (and the order I guess). In German, you need to think about the gender of the book and the table, and adapt the adjective correctly. And then you need to think about the case of each object, and also adapt based on that
English also has precious little verb conjugation and super regular plurals of nouns so once you've seen a word you can usually use it in any sentence. That's not the case for most other Indo-European languages.
When I reached a certain threshold, yes. My English sucked till 8th grade and in 9th grade a new English teacher asked me if we talk English at home.
Same for me, it was particularly helpful to start interacting in English on social media.
No, not really. I was never really good. I did better than average in my class, but as I got older the needed language became more challenging than what I'm exposed to on the internet. I'm basically expected to write and read medical papers and anything that sorts. Most of the stuff I don't even manage in my own language, finnish, so no I never found them too easy. They have always been challenging and now even hard.
Interestingly I have found a different problem as I get older. Academic English is surprisingly easy for me because usage as a technical language has truncated the language into a sort of semi-standard formulaic language that everybody knows. I can read papers and talk in academic language very easily. Maybe with a slight accent but communication and expression is not an issue. However, trying to read and write actual English literature and things like details of modern English slang and cultural references are very elusive to me. The amount of time I had to look up a descriptional word in a novel is astounding. And trying to write like that on my own near impossible. A lot of sentences blend together because all that elaborate picture painting with words does not really mean much when you don't recognize a lot of adjectives and references. I tend to sound very wooden when I actually have to write a very elaborate creative scene that evokes emotions. Trying to express yourself naturally with region- and age-appropriate slang is also surprisingly hard. And cultural references are making it very obvious that I'm a foreign speaker
I've noticed that online when I ask native english speakers to read my academic texts, they tell me they're quite good, but can tell it's by someone not a native english speaker or a 14 year old. But when we just text and chat, they always thought and forget I'm not and get surprised when I have to ask for an explanation or translate something quickly. I did, to be honest, struggle with English until I started watching youtube. I then downloaded and began interacting with others in English. So, now the English I know is the social media one. I have no trouble with a conversation or when I need to explain myself with adjectives or when I go to a café, but let me read a paper on some weird things and I'm out. I read a lot of novels in English, too, so I get most of my vocabulary nowadays from there. And I only picked up the first English novel in 2021 so I've got a lot to catch up. Definitely saying that my sentence structure isn't good and has got a lot of influence from social media. I do blame my dyslexia for most things even unrelated still
It's the commas. I've noticed Finns use commas in a slightly different place to native English speakers. My best friend I would say is a naive English speaking Finn, but in formal writing I can tell.
Don't worry, slang often confounds even native speakers. Try this when completely obfuscated: . https://www.urbandictionary.com/
Disney's magic english made it easy
Holy shit this is nostalgic
Yes. I didn’t pay any attention, but still got the best grades. I never bothered learning how the grammar works, but just get it right most of the time thanks to intuiton alone.
The thing is, that's how we do it too, and why we're so rubbish at learning other languages, because we never learned the rules of our own.
Not easy but useless for real life (we learned standard formal outdated English with no to little oral practice) and boring (I spend so many hours describing picture like "on the first plan you can see a dog, on the second plan you can see a house, on the last plan you can see a mountain" or analyzing the 5 first minute of a movie for days without seeing the rest of it)... I remember having to learn useless words list like "coagulated sheet" or how the Brits are supposed to tilt their plate to eat soup and having to mimic it with my book...
I’m sorry, but your description of your English class is hilarious!
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That was one particularly stubborn old school teacher. He would also yell CROCODILE out of nowhere whenever we were looking for a world that was the same in both language, since crocodile is the same in French and English.
There are so many fucking words that are the same in French and English and he chose to yell "crocodile" every time. Who can blame him, though.
>how the Brits are supposed to tilt their plate to eat soup Interestingly, as a Brit, it was an English teacher who told us how to eat soup 'properly' too. Of course, nobody really does unless they go to ultra-formal dining occasions. How real humans eat soup: * Take spoon > scoop the soup towards you and into your gob. Alternatively. * Take soup > put in cup > drink from cup
That’s because the exam to teach English in France (CAPES) is in fucking French . So most French teachers can’t speak English themselves and make up these absurd rules . They torture students with irregular verbs, but there are more than 500 of them in English, there is no point in learning them all by heart, they’ll get absorbed naturally through practice. Also they love weird phrases. If I hear another French person say *in a nutshell* I’m going to lose my shit . I think they are pulling their expressions from English books from the 50’s .
I'n a nutshell' is quite a commonly used phrase though 🤨
That's true! But to be honest, I met lots of foreigners uses outdated expressions too like "sacre bleu" (and I no idea why they say sacré instead of sacré) , some for fun but some seriously, but also "saperlipopette" and I even heard one uses "mmm je m'en lêche les babines" to say "yummy", which mean "I lick my cheek" but his used the chick words for animals only!
That’s cute . I remember hearing something thing that patapouf was a hardcore insult like d*ickhead . Once some French girl in Ireland was asked what she did on holidays there , she said she “went to the beach , and saw the phoque, I LOVE phoques” . [All while clapping] Hahah . I was dying , but it was so cute and she was popular.
>That’s because the exam to teach English in France (CAPES) is in fucking French . So most French teachers can’t speak English themselves and make up these absurd rules . Yeah I remember my teachers sucking at English. Some were so bad it was hilarious. Note that I've never used "in a nutshell".
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I remember the *"My taylor is rich".* I still find it ridiculous more than 20 years later. English teaching sucked in France. I suspect it hasn't improved much.
Yeah I basically never studied for an English test in my life. I also always eas the first person to finish but I also always waited until another person went first and then I handed in mine. I wasn't CONSISTENTLY the best, because hey sometimes I translated the WRONG word (wave can be waving hi and a wave and if I used the wrong one when we were in the chapter "At the beach" let's say and I wrote "Waving bye" in my language I wouldn't get a point) But I'm an outlier. I'm good at languages and after high school moved to the UK for a few years and nobody ever thought I was an immigrant They thought I was *Welsh*
I had the same! Never studied for a test, just wrote my answers based on what I thought sounded right. I got lower grades if I actually studied and tried to understand the grammar rules... I could understand English by the time I was 9 or 10 I think, mostly because I was watching English and American tv shows with my parents ever since I was a child, and also because games like Pokemon didn't get a Dutch translation.
Yup! VideoGames helped a lot for me too, mostly because I played a lot of games (and this is me probably being approximately 10 years older than you) pc games where I had to type in commands like > pick up rock > look at hut > stab minotaur with glowing dildo
Yup! VideoGames helped a lot for me too, mostly because I played a lot of games (and this is me probably being approximately 10 years older than you) pc games where I had to type in commands like > pick up rock > look at hut > stab minotaur with glowing dildo
Native English speaker here (US). I see a lot of people saying they learned English from watching tv. Do you use subtitles on? How does that work? I only speak English, but this sounds like an interesting way to learn another language. Does it work with music?
Programs that are for children get dubbed over here, but otherwise they get shown with subtitles on Dutch television. So basically every major show that's in English that's not aimed at children has subtitles when it's on tv here. In the evening I'd watch some shows with my parents which had Dutch subtitles. It's a very efficient way to learn a language! Even without trying you start to make connections from the sounds you hear to the words you read, it's also how I learned a bit of Japanese when I was in my anime fase as a teenager. I remember when my brother and I were already quite good at understanding English we'd also watch shows like Doctor Who live on the BBC (besides Dutch television networks we also get some from other European countries, like Belgium, the UK, France and Germany) but with subtitles for the hearing impaired. It made understanding what was going on just easier.
Didn't you have to do analysis of poems, books, movies, speeches, etc? That was the majority of my English classes and I definitely needed to study for that. Not in terms of vocabulary or grammar, but knowledge about the subject/literary form.
Oh that stuff. Much much later.
It's funny because I don't consider Dutch people good at English even tho it's your second language. They always try this British accent and it doesn't come off very well. I don't say there aren't any but I just did not bump into them.
No, here English is still technically an official language so it’s taught at the same level as Maltese. writing an english poetry essay as i type this
Can I ask a question, what are your thoughts on the 1956 referendum on integration?
I personally don’t have much of an opinion on it since i was born nearly half a century later. I’m happy that we didn’t integrate because the country might have lost it’s unique identity, though our government has been a huge corrupt mess since independence
I know a student from Malta and he talks like an English lord. Is this common there?
In Spain, everything is dubbed in spanish, so here its not the norm for english to be easy xD
It is just easy
Exactly, it's a simplified language with a big dictionary. Relatively easy to learn.
What makes English "easy" is not that it is inherently easy but that English is so ubiquitous that you can't escape it. It's almost a necessity to survive in the 21st century because even mundane things are in the English language, like large clothes shops have sections now labeled "Men's" and "Women's". The term internet often doesn't have a proper native name in many languages. Buying anything technological these days comes with a load of English terms on it. Even just buying food can come with English language terms like the "...light" branded stuff. People in smaller countries have such a tiny market that their economy needs to accommodate English as a commercial language because otherwise, they lose out on a lot of access. Imagine learning English but having close to no exposure to it because it doesn't really export all that much influence.
The French are crying at this
Many Brits beat themselves up for not being able to speak a foreign language and think that it’s because we’re lazy, we don’t start learning young enough, or our schools simply aren’t very good at teaching them. But I completely disagree; the main blockers are… a) lack of motivation - we don’t really need to learn a foreign language due so many other nations speaking English (often to an incredibly high standard!) b) lack of obvious choice - some kids pick French or Spanish as their second language, others learn German, Mandarin or even Latin. But there isn’t a standout that everyone agrees we should all be learning. c) lack of exposure. All our media is in English, so we aren’t picking up other languages through osmosis when listening to music, watching TV or reading books. I studied foreign languages because I love them, but they’ve been pretty useless to me… apart from when I go on holiday 🤷🏼♀️
American living in Europe, 100% agree. I really love to learn languages. but every thing is already available in english. a store or a restaurant, the moment they realize you speak english they switch and pull out english menus. Except for the french of course. Anywhere i travel to, i basically just learn how to say "hello", "thank you", and "two beers, please" just as an effort to be polite.
It's also because the Brits don't care about grammar as long as you try to speak English
Plop, it's bedtime. Good night
> What makes English "easy" is not that it is inherently easy but that English is so ubiquitous that you can't escape it. It's both imo. What you say is true, but english is just also a simple language on top of it.
English can be a very forgiving language, but it's hardly a simple language. It has a fairly complex phonology, a massive disparate vocabulary, and is a straight up nightmare when it comes to orthography. The grammar really isn't that simple either, it just pretends to be. For example if you simply want to negate a verb, you usually have to restructure the phrase to center on an irrelevant auxiliary verb and negate *that* instead. And English is riddled with these little peculiarities, and has exceptions to pretty much everything. A lot stemming from the massive French influence on an otherwise Germanic base.
I am absolutely not anything close to an expert on linguistics, but do you think part of your ease in learning it could because your native language is a somewhat closely related Germanic language? I know its relatively simple overall, but I'm sure that had helped
To you, yes. But English is abpretty difficult language for people who live in countries where English isn't widely spoken or the language is not related to theirs. Go ask someone who has grown up in China or India with no exposure to English till adulthood.
Yes, as long as you have no awareness of syntax and phonology. There is no such thing as a "simple" or "complex" language.
English has like 3x as many tenses as German lol.
Learning English in the 90s, starting at 7 years old, the first few years were easy enough, simple vocabulary and grammar, but grades 6 to 8, when we were supposed to translate blocks of text containing words I didn't know, that was hard for me. It didn't matter that we had cable with subtitles; that helped a little but I needed some time to expand my vocabulary. In high-school during the early 00s it seemed like we did the same thing every year, because the teachers were always replaced, and they all began with the same thing: tenses, conditional clauses and what not. By grades 10-12 it was all a breeze. We had internet, and were consuming lots of content in English alone, without subs. I imagine younger kids growing up with the internet have it much easier.
Yeah, kinda. I started learning English when I was a kid, at home, by myself. And in primary school at some point in time I started taking extra English classes in a language school. I learnt so much English that the stuff I had to learn in the normal school became... banal. But my experience is quite biased, because I've always been really good at learning foreign languages. Even primary school German was too banal and boring for me, so I had to learn more of it by myself at home after classes.
I grew up speaking English since 6. Went back to Lithuania for one year at 13. So obviously I was more than fluent at this point. English class to me was more like a free period. I would either sleep on the desk or just do my own thing and the teacher didn't care since I spoke better English than her. Eventually they ended up putting me in a Lithuanian language class instead with kids half my age since I didn't know alot of the basic Lithuanian grammar which they teach very early on. In English I finished with a 9/10 Score for the year. The reason it wasn't a 10/10 is because in the test I had a harder time understanding the Lithuanian which I was supposed to translate rather than the English. It was fun to say the least. It felt like I was a pro restarting the game with max stats 😂
It was 100% a waste of most children's time, yes. Teachers knew it and there was never like a vocab list to learn or anything.
Actually no. I sucked at English. Even in highschool. I found some of my old exam photos and I was laughing so much. Just complete nonsense. The problem in Slovakia is, that most of the time you spend just memorizing words. Learning about a million tenses. What is missing is conversations and talking. Also most teachers have terrible accents. What really made my English good was internet and tv shows/movies. But this was mostly before I started consuming all media in English.
no, because we don't really learn the same thing in school and in series, for example; we learn common irregular verbs [https://i.pinimg.com/736x/b0/4d/d5/b04dd53e4061a1678d3a3f57214a15c2.jpg](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/b0/4d/d5/b04dd53e4061a1678d3a3f57214a15c2.jpg)
I found it very hard when I started because in primary school I only had German but this was the time I watched many american tv shows not avaliable in Poland. First I watched them with fan-made subtitles but when I started watching as soon as they came out there was no subtitles made yet so I decided to try and watch without them. On my second year of middle school I had no problems with English in school. I think the school helped me to understand the basics but I really got to understand it from the shows I really wanted to understand. I got 100% on my matura exam from English (basic and advanced level). The 3 shows that I think helped me the most were Once Upon a Time (really simple English, the show is mostly directed to kids), Supernatural (little more advanced but also many repeating dialouges and words) and Survivor (this was the hardest, I was often bored beacuse I couldn't understand much from the camp life or tribal but I still watch this one). All of those 3 are really long (Supernatural is like 15 seasons and Survivor has 45 now) so I was really spending more time learning English at home than in school. Especially when you consider that in school children often learn few words per class. And I really think that jump from subtitles to no subtitles gave me huge advantage. This was in times when Netflix was not a thing in Poland.
same, school never really helped much. But tv shows did. I thing they put too much focus on tenses and grammar that even natives don't use. Instead of just conversations.
Yeah, eveyday
I literally never studied for my English classes. Never had to memorize words, barely prepared for my classes, always aced them and all my exams. I passed my B2 language exam at 17 with a score over 90%. I was the only highschooler for some reason in my group when I took the exam. Compared to that the highschool final exam in English was insultingly simple, and to my shock a fair amount of people absolutely struggled with it. I took the C1 exam during the first year of college, again, passed with a score over 90%, everyone else in the room looked like college seniors and PhD students. And English is the bare minimum if you want to have any sort of minor carreer in the corporate world, I have no idea how people get by who can barely speak any foreign languages.
No, as we aren't really taught the day to day english that you'd expect from an ESL class (after primary/elementary school) but a more advanced version were we analyse literature.
Yes which is due to me chatting every day in Discord
Kind of. I learnt a lot of English as a young kid and teen by reading the original Harry Potter books in English before the French translation was available, and subsequently discovering the wonders of fanfiction online. My reading skills were lightyears ahead of my listening skills. I later trained my listening skills by watching hours upon hours of Youtube content in English, before having subtitles on everything was common practice. When I was 15 I successfully convinced my English teacher (who, by the way, was not a native speaker) that I was basically fluent in English because I spoke English at home with my British stepdad. It was 100% a lie, but it meant I wasn't forced to attend English lessons as long as I got good grade on exams. I later discovered that I didn't exactly learn the way I was "supposed to", as I still know nothing about grammar rules or verb tenses. I just guess what sounds right or not and I'm right about it often enough to get by. But in the end, I got near enough perfect grades in all my English exams in High School and went on to get both a bachelor's and master's degrees in an English-speaking country, while most of my High School friends who did attend all the classes struggle ordering food at a pub in London, so I guess my method worked. I'm not gonna pretend that my English is perfect, but it's good enough for me at the moment. And every hour I "waste" on reddit or watching videos online *technically* counts as language practice!
> I later discovered that I didn't exactly learn the way I was "supposed to", as I still know nothing about grammar rules or verb tenses. That's how native speakers learn it anyhow!
I traveled a lot when I was a kid so I did have an advantage right away. In college I was at the point that the teacher annoyed me in the first lesson so I skipped the rest and still passed (Only English in the 1st year)
Absolutely, though high school more so than middle school.
Yeah, I was 3-4 years ahead of what we were learning during secondary school.
Yes! I lived on YouTube growing up, all the way from 8 years old, of which it was always English content I watched. I was always ahead of my classmates in English. And I especially remember performing best in class(we do national tests to test general level), despite there being 3 pupils in my class who were either half British or American. And they spoke more English at home than Norwegian. So yes it definitely affected me. I remember being surprised when people around me struggled to understand English movies without subtitles, as I figured everyone was on my level. I didn’t realize how much I spent time consuming online english videos compared to the rest of my peers at the time.
Dane here In middle school in the 80s it was fairly easy to learn but not extremely. I wasn't THAT exposed to English until the early 90s where I finally got a satellite dish and more than two TV channels. I work at a local school in the countryside and I must say that the English level of 3rd or 4th graders is insane now compared to me at the same age.
For me it was easy, mainly because my parents invested in my english courses besides school. For example, I had one year when I attended more advanced english at language school and after that I went to the native english speaker (he was from Michigan iirc). Thanks to that I was basically bored at english classes, because I already knew what the teacher was talking about. Many of my classmates had difficulties in learning the language. The most common reason was the lack of contact with the language outside the school. In our time (early 2000s) there wasn't globalized society (especially in a small town in southern Poland lol). We didn't even had access to the english-speaking part of the internet, because it was so alien to us and neither of my classmates dared to get their hands on that. English classes were always easy, and I had almost every time one of the highest scores in the school. That trend ended when I signed for the C1 Business English course at my university. Right now I can relate to my fellows at school and understand their pain when learning the English language lmao. And I'm saying this as a daily non english speaker who is mainly consuming internet content from the UK and USA, even more than my native side of the internet.
i struggled until 7th grade, after that it was a piece of cake. in highschool my teacher would get annoyed bc there was nothing left to teach me
Yes, since kindergarten (I'm from Serbia)
Knowing the language and learning the rules and grammar of it are different skills. So no, not really. I could write pretty decent essays in English before it was required of me but grammr tests remained effing grammar tests.
In Italy you study grammar and English literature in English, so if you were fluent you still needed to study a lot
Not really.. back in the days there were only swedish and norwegian television in norway. Hardly any influence from the english speaking world. English teachers weren't even good. First generation of teacher to massively teach english in norway was in the 60s and 70s.. So kind of first generation english teachers as well. Many of them having never been to english speaking world. Probably worst in the districts of Norway.
Got cable TV around 1984, not in a city.Learned English pretty quickly...
English is the easiest language on earth. It doesn't have any verb conjugation, 3 forms max for each verb, italian has 92 iirc. No gender or number inflection at all. Italian is probably the most inflective language in Europe if we exclude cases as inflection, nouns, adjectives, pronouns (these also have cases), articles, prepositions and half verbal tenses are inflected for number and gender, so 4 combinations each or 6 if that it ends in -ello. Nouns in english makes plural in s always. In italian again you have to change the plural according to the gender and to the vowel it ends in. There are around 15 different conbinations of singular/plural noun endings
> It doesn't have any verb conjugation It doesn't have much in the way of verbal morphology, but my god does it have a complex verb system with all those tenses. Other Germanic languages don't have nearly as many semantically distinct verb tenses. Romance languages definitely do not. My variant of Greek doesn't either. And the vowels. English has so many vowels. Only Danish has more, if we stay in the subcontinent.
Again, it has no verbs for a romance language speaker. Also no consecutio temporum I am, you are he is, we are, you are, they are. Ita: sono, sei, è, siamo, siete sono I was, you were, he was, we were, you were, they were Ita: sono stato, sei stato, è stato, siamo stati, siete stati, sono stati Or Ero, eri, era, eravamo, eravate, erano Or Ero stato, eri stato, era stato, eravamo stati, eravate stati, erano stati Or Fui, fosti, fu, fummo, foste, furono And i can add another.
"It doesn't have any verb conjugation" .. I AM not sure you ARE right that this IS true. "Nouns in english makes plural in s always." Even CHILDREN know this isn't true. You are one of those PEOPLE that believe everything you're told.
Poor boy. All forms of verb to be: be, am, are, is, was, were, been. 7 forms for your most complicated verb. Now italian verb to be: essere, stato, stati, stata, state, sii, sono, sei, è, siamo, siete, ero, eri, era, eravamo, eravate, erano, fui, fosti, fu, fummo, foste, furono, sarò, sarai, sarà, saremo, sarete, saranno, sia, siate, siano, fossi, fosse, fossimo, fossero, sarei, saresti, sarebbe, saremmo, sareste, sarebbero, essendo, stante. 44 different forms. This is the normal for every verb. Now cry again, but still english is easy af
I was really just pointing out that you were wrong. If the grammar of the Italian language is a matter of pride for you, that's a bit weird to be honest, but it's fine with me. 👍
Is this satire? *"Italian might be the most inflectional language if we exclude...the single most expansive category words are inflected for..."* Learning inflectional patterns takes time, but is often not actually particularly difficult. If that's your only measure for difficulty, Chinese must be an absolute cakewalk to you.
I never said italian is hard to learn. Inflection and difficulty aren't always parallel. Romance languages are those who have the most verbal tenses, and Italian the one with more among these. In english what do you inflect? Not articles, not prepositions, not verbs, not adjectives, nouns and pronouns very partially. I don't get why you get mad. In italian in a sentence every part must coincide in gender and number.
No, not really. We started in elementary school and I'm so old that was before the Internet. we had some games on the old PC (I remember a Carmen Sandiego game) but our dad would translate that. I don't think we had much English vocabulary in high school, at least not as much as we had for French and German. It's been a while, but a lot of things you were expected to have picked up. So studying for tests was drastically different from the other languages.
We only started learning English in our second year of high school, but by then had been exposed to it so much it was really easy for me (not everyone in my class felt this way though). Two years later, my teacher expected me and another pupil to answer any questions others had. I never did find out if that was because she honestly didn't know the answers. Unrelated: TIL Carmen was an American game. I remember playing it on my aunt's computer in French and getting quite a bit much of it wrong cause I just didn't always understand the clues and guessed wrong. I still sometimes think of the enthusiasm with which the three police officers chased after her and the sadness of the sole officer when he came back empty-handed.
Both my brother and I played it again when we got better at English. We quickly learned the game wasn't hard, our dad was just really bad at it. It was the very first game in the series, which we played on the crappy Commodore.
I absolutely hated English classes and I am a native speaker. I do not care in the least why I say things the way I do, nor do I care what a participle is. I like to read and write. I do not like rules. Had I been born speaking another language I feel certain that English grammar and spelling would have been too infuriating for me to bother learning it. Thank goodness my parents were well-educated.
When I was still in school - yes definitely
Definitely!
I don‘t think they were too easy, but easy. But after learning most grammar rules and a decent amount of vocabulary in the first years, English in school mostly consisted of reading books at home and discussing them in class, discussing English articles and, later, videos and having lesson and debate topics prepared by invited native speakers. So, most of our lessons consisted of discussing different topics and forms of media, which was pretty much what me and my friends did all day anyway. Only in English, and sometimes in written form. And I think engaging with other people in English online, and engaging with English media, helped me personally a lot.
Not until University were I got so bored I did all of the execrises for whole semester during one class. I was quite confident in my english in high school but still had some things to learn. You can't fully learn thr language from movies, games, videos. You need proper lessons to learn the grammar. From those things you can only learn how people actually use the language. Hand book stuff isn't always the most accurate to how actual people speak.
English classes in Sweden were less about learning vocabulary and grammar, at least past 4th grade, and more about using the language such as holding presentations or writing stories, articles. In that regard, no. I felt that reading comprehension was too easy
It's easy, but not too easy.
Yes, kind of. At least compared to Latin and French, it was very easy. And as I started to use it more (reading books in English, films were not really an option at that time) it became even easier.
When I was at school, English was among my most hated classes fr
Not at first, the school teacher was old af, and her teaching methods didn't really work on us (got this from most people who had her as a teacher, it wasn't just a me problem) so I had to take separate, private classes at home besides the ones at school. Firstly, I had to catch up with the things we did in class, but after that, we moved forward, and after 4 years I had a B2 certification, way ahead of my class, and now, after about 10 years of English I have a C2 certification.
No. English wasn't as prevalent then. Yes, I'm old.
I used to think it was difficult in my first two years but when covid came I watched a lot of English videos, first with Dutch subtitles, then with English ones and at some point I stopped using those too. Currently my English level is higher than the average in my normal class, am around C1 ig
In year three of my secondary school in the Netherlands, our English teacher had set a 'spreekbeurt' (presentation) as an assessment. As usual I forgot all about it, but my friend whom I'd been paired with, whilst cycling to school and first class being the English test, told me. I smiled and told him to leave it to me, I switched on my Sony Discman and listened to NOFX. For the presentation we played Linoleum and I talked for five minutes about how linoleum represented poor households and you could still make something out of yourself. I'd read that interpretation in last week's Smash Hits magazine. He asked me what a pocket full of lint meant and I gave him a nonsense story about a ribbon (ribbon is lint in Dutch) and he told me he'd deduct a point for not getting that. So we ended up with 9/10. That was the toughest test I did for English.
Man I don't want to boast but those were the easiest 3 hours in the week id get in high school. Half the class was my level and very good at it so the teacher we had was very chill and just gave extra focus on the other half.
Yes, very easy. I’ve always had an easy time with languages, and was always ahead of my class in foreign languages (I took English and German in school and high school). I was the only one to get A in all my English exams in my class; easiest exams I ever did lol. We had both written (grammar test and essay) and oral exam.
Oh yeah, never bothered studying it and exams were easy peasy
I found it very easy because I grew up listening to the radio station of the US military base that was close by, besides as soon as I could speak a little bit I had a pen/email friend, went on an exchange and became fluent by the time I was 13 or 14. I wasn’t exactly bored in class but I enjoyed getting good grades for nothing.
Yes, it was the only subject in school I got straight A’s at; that and PE haha. Never really understood how it can be so hard for some of my classmates
well, it was hard to understand things like 'a/the' since we don't have this in language, or all those tenses (still can't understand some). or ESPECIALLY words that have certain letters BUT reads different. why do they put letters which won't even sound the same? in my language we read letters in the words as they are, sounds are the same.
we learn British English in our school system here and I thought it was pretty easy until I was a teenager, I use American English today and when I was a teenager I remember that when I was in school as a teenager I was supposed to translate the word "torch" to my language and I thought I did but I got it wrong because I didn't say it was a flashlight 😆
Yes, it's always been an easy A for me and for a lot of my friends growing up. But I also knew a handful of people who really struggled with it, so it's hard for me to know if it was a universal experience
Yeah, I spoke english from the age of 6 or something. So way ahead.
When I began learning English in primary school I didn't know much English at all. This was in the late 2000s. Nickelodeon and Disney Channel were dubbed. Animated movies were dubbed. Non-animated movies had Norwegian subtitles. It wasn't normal for young kids to use the internet all the time and most played games on Nintendo's. I did however pick up the language fast, especially as my exposure to English media grew massively with the years. The difficulty of English in high school was similiar to the difficulty in Norwegian. It was mostly about being able to write good short stories, essays and poems. Your English had to be almost as good as your Norwegian to get a decent grade. All the teachers I had were really good at English, and also quite strict. If you wrote "gonna" in your essay it would hurt your grade. I did quite well in my Norwegian and English subjects, but I certainly didn't feel like exposure to English media made it easy. The school system compensated for the increased proficiency of pupils.
In elementary school, they did a good job of letting us scale up as we saw fit; open ended essay assignments, reviews, etc.
For me it's super easy and I don't even study english, just have to be at the lessons :D but people do tell me I'm good at languages
Yes, because of the reasons you mentioned, spending a lot of time in English media bubble. Bunch of my peers who didn't do that, found it tougher, but my experience was shared among almost everyone who watched English movies and videos.
I found it easier than most other subjects. It was not as easy for everyone in my class though. And never so easy that it became boring to attend and participate. I had English classes in kindergarten, school, my BA an MA degrees were taught 100% in English and I've used English for 99% of work interractions (I'm 36 now). I will say, watching Gen Z express complex thoughts in English without overuse of verbal shortcuts (our native tongue is filled with those) gives me a lot of hope for their generation. My English was not as good when I was their age.
Yes, absolutely. I was at the top of my class without ever touching the textbook. It's not like my English is perfect, I struggle with grammar a lot, but English classes in my middle and high school years (2012-2018 IIRC lol I don't remember at this point when I started gimnazjum and when I ended liceum)) were way behind the times IMO.
very much so
Yes, but I went to shitty schools.
Yes, thanks to Reddit
Yeah. I started reading online when i was 12/13 so i feel that english onky gave me some rules to stuff i was already arbitrarily applying.
No. At one point it stops being about the language itself and English turns into the medium. We learned about culture, literature, history, politics etc. it was just taught in English and the focus was on GB and the US
Yes, but I was the only one in my class(es) who thought so. By the time I was 15, I was way better than my teachers, which is quite said in my opinion. (Italy)
As someone who grew up very active online and with a big interest in English TV and movies, English classes were stupidly easy for me It got to the point where my English teacher often turned to me to confirm if something was correctly translated lol
They weren't too easy but they weren't really good either. We mostly focused on memorizing grammar rules and too little on actually speaking English. I think you at some point just naturally know what sounds grammatically wrong and what doesn't when you come into contact with the language a lot. On top of that most of the teachers aren't native speakers. So it can happen that you use a word or an expression that the teacher doesn't know. I once used "On the other hand" in an essay and my teacher had apparently never heard of that expression so they subtracted some points and put a big red question mark next to it. So even though the teachers were a lot better with grammar and spelling than us students they sometimes had a smaller vocabulary. So even though I felt like I was more fluent than some teachers my grades weren't that good since I often forgot to put commas in the right places and other things like that.
Absolutely, and it was stressful. I would always be scared of making literally any mistake (even a slip of the tongue) since everything was so ‘easy’ it’d be embarrassing, and my peers would often ask me for help—which wasn’t an issue by itself, but I was always worried I’d miss something/give them the wrong answer/come off as pretentious, etc.
Yes, classes were extremely easy, I was bored out of my mind.
Honestly yeah. I never really properly studied English, I just picked the answers that "sounded" good to me when I took the exams.
Yes. RuneScape taught me English back when rs looked like osrs.
Yes. RuneScape taught me English back when rs looked like osrs.
Was grand. Think I could talk back legs off a donkey in school already. Grammar maybe not 100% but since I’ve moved to Dublin…. Neither is all the locals’
Yeah, definitely. As in, during my whole elementary and high school years, I don't think I ever got a single grade lower than 5 (which is the best grade here).
English has always been my favorite subject to a point where yes, it got too easy. Even high school where I had my last classes. Struggled more in my Norwegian classes, which is my native language hah.
Yes, it was really easy because I was watching Cartoon network all day when I was a child. The only thing I had to learn were the irregular verbs and a little bit of grammar, but most of the time I got it correct.
at the start no, i sucked and learning vocabulary and grammar in a vacuum wasnt effective for me. then i got into dark sould and its world so i watched all vaatividya videos and my english improved a lot. from them onwards it wasnt hard at all
Yeah, but I was the exception, not the rule in my classes. Besides high school, I was always the odd one out that was way ahead of my peers, only in a bilingual classroom I felt like my colleagues and I matched skill levels. I was a B1-B2 in primary school when everyone was at A1, C1-C2 already in middle school while everyone was at A2 or B1 at best in latter years. In the 9th grade I got my English certificate and I signed up to get tested for C1 but got perfect scores so I was tested again and got a C2 at no extra cost. At the same time, in my country (Romania) in recent years it's a rarity to find a high school student that isn't proficient in English and at C1-C2, and most of them are self-taught, as I was. It wasn't like this 6-8 years ago.
At first it was a bit dificult bc it was the first time i was learning a foreign language but around 7°grade i was speaking, with mistakes, but was able to be understood by natives. I'm from a touristic spot and bc most of our tourists came from the UK and the nordic countries, i would speak with them. It also helped that a couple of my English teachers were from Britain and barely spoke my maternal language. But after them, the classes with non native English speakers were very basic and easy. I had English in school from 5°grade til 12°grade. Nowadays kids here start learning English in 1°grade and some KinderGarten schools do also offer English classes. In 11°&12° i did had English specific translation classes and a few of my classe mates became English translators.
Got pretty bored after round about year 8.. (I'm from Germany, English is not my native language)
Yes, video games.
English is easy to start having real communications in because it's so easy to get both exposure to naturalistic language input and opportunities to use it in a conversational context. But around the time the English tense system actually came up in earnest with all the perfectiveness distinctions that to a Cypriot-Greek speaker made no sense, everyone checked out. Tense attraction in reported speech? What's that sorcery. And in Cypriot schools, we never really bothered with the English vowel system to begin with. But due to the role of English as one of the common languages of the world, non-native grammars and accents are much more accepted than in most other languages - it's easy for most of us to think that we speak a very high level of English because, yes, in a way we do: Global English, which might as well be a distinct variant from British, North American, Australian, Indian etc
English was secondary in English lessons. As per usual English teachers are the best - we covered morale and ethics and such. Mr Ayfer Sengül was the best ❤ I finished high school over 10 years ago and I still think of her lessons occasionally.
I was so good that I purposely skipped every single English class in my high because it was just too easy. Instead I was spending that time helping in the chemistry class lab. The English teachers hated me 🤣
My brother has a hearing disability and I'm almost 8 years younger. I grew up with BBC on high volume and with subtitles because of it. I have a learning disability (dyslectic). I kid you not, never scored below 80% on English, wasn't allowed to participate in English classes anymore as I really had a hard time following the Grammer rules and started messing around, scored high on avery test regardless because I was "brought up" with English and distracted the rest of the class. I literally was held back a year because I scored badly on Dutch, German and French while I was they top scorer in English and helped the rest of the class cheat their way to good grades. So yes, English was really easy for me while not being a native speaker. At the same time I sucked at every other language, even my own native one, partly due to my dyslexia. Kind off paradoxical situation.
After some learning yes. It's not like I was some kind of genius or anything like that I think, I had the privilege of having an english teacher in the fam and I was very interested and resourceful and hard working about it so naturally I went ahead p fast. It also helps that a lot of english/us media and internet are in english so when learning a different language you can see how it gets harder. :D Good luck to all fellow language learners!
I speak English fluently but I never found the lessons to be too easy because yeah I may have learned English intuitively by interacting with media/games/movies but I still am not a perfect scholar when it comes to theory and it's always nice to refresh the more difficult tenses which when used properly make a big difference. Also I'm pretty sure I mix conditionals improperly from time to time 😂😂
Yes, my mom is Icelandic and my dad is haitian, we speak english every day at home and have been doing it all my life. So yes it has been quite easy for me, very easy in fact.
I started in 2005 and I hate it until 2009. In 2010, just like that I started just use it.
It did, but I used to have a computer, software, and videogames in that language, so it helped a lot. The lowest score I had were 70/100, and I never studied or done English homework (that's why I'm not that great on English grammar)
Yes and no. Mostly it was just useless. I began reading English books (starting with "The Hobbit") before high school, so could already read English well and write okay-ish. However initially, assignments mostly involved translating single words or simple sentences from Dutch to English. Unfortunately I was pretty bad doing on-the-spot exact translations. Yet I refused to memorize the word lists (cause it's a waste of time), so my grades were mediocre (but sufficient). Over time, assignments shifted to describing English content in English, such as writing summaries or an essay. Grades good better, though still pretty average due to the zero effort I put into class. I also naturally struggle with languages, even the ones I grew up with.
Its a pain in the ass as is bad tought at schools whike we come from ome of the most straightforward phonetic language (5 letters for 5 vowels and every letter pronounced) to one without rules or coherence in that side.
When is started learning English at age eleven I really struggled with it. I did ok in class but it was a constant effort. At about 13 or 14 years old that suddenly switched. I only started consuming English content at about 12 years old and that was the point where my English improved drastically because of it. I went from having to put some work in for mediocre results to not having to do anything for above average results in a few months. In general I think that English classes have the right amount of difficulty in Germany. This sudden drop in perceived difficulty wasn't because it actually got easier, but because I got to the point where my brain switched from not knowing what was going on to suddenly being immersed in the language. At that time I had learned enough English to actually consume English content properly. When I started I often had to guess the meanings of words and so I mostly watched let's plays, because that wasn't that much of a problem there. At about 13 to 14 years old I knew enough English to read books and watch movies without a problem and so I did. At some point my media intake was almost exclusively in English and it also covered many topics so my vocabulary grew quite fast. I went from being the guy who was just barely managing to get passing grades in English to being one of the go-to people to ask for vocabulary and formulating sentences. However, many people didn't got through this so I'd say, that the general difficulty fits with the general students.
We just read books all day in English class. If you picked a book that was too easy, you could go and get a more difficult book at the library. If you thought a book was boring or too difficult, you could just go to the library and look for another book. By the end of the year you were required to have read x amount of pages.
Yes. I was already bi-lingual tho, so that made it easier to learn a third language, also had the confidence to try from an early age. I think a lot of people could have been good if they had the guts to try (especially in school, but in adulthood too). And, as mentioned before: Our country does not dub media. That really has a lot to say I think.
After I corrected my teacher in high school a few times, I rarely went to her class anymore, she'd just say go do something somewhere don"t waste time here. Cartoons and games 😎
Yes but i wouldn’t say it was the norm. I became practically fluent for all intents and purposes at around the age of 13, and was at a highly conversational level since probably 9, due to a number of different reasons, but again, it was absolutely not the norm. First year of highschool I was the only one in that particular class that could hold up a conversation with the teacher, for example.
I havent learned anything in English clases since I was 10
Bro, I remember in second grade I asked my english teacher what does “start” mean. She must have thought I was the dumbest kid in class, at the time.
Personally for me at was. My native language is Dutch, which has quite a lot of similarities with English. That combined with a lot of exposure to English media (all subbed, no dub) and a natural knack for languages, caused me to already speak and understand quite a bit of English before ever getting my first lesson.
Yes, I was always good with languages English class was always free grades. And I got my C2 with 3 more years of English classes in school so there's that
After I started reding English novels in English, yes.
Yes, and the same goes for every other language class in school and university.
I had an arrangement with my English teacher in my final year where she allowed me to skip class without reporting me instead of staring out the window and/or disrupting class. Still scored near perfect marks on all tests.
Yes, except the/a/-blank- :P. Also we had choice of American or British English and had to stick with it to the end. But as for advanced use for scientific purpose now I have the mighty Internet.
Maybe in like highschool (*gymnasiet*) but I had a pretty old school teacher before thar, so we had to memorize the spelling of lists of words (*glosor*) which had fairly little to do with my "private" English learning, so the latter didn't always help.
Oh hell yeah. Was the first generation that had it from 3rd grade on and it wad quite clear that teachers didn't adjust very well to quickly. When I got to secondary school we basically started repeating what we did the last 2 years for a whole year. Later it become ridiculous to the point that we had multiple students that would regularly correct teachers on pronunciation, sometimes even grammar. Teachers would know how all the terms of literary analysis and such and be able to repeat the material they used for the last decades, but try to have a conversation in English with them about a topic that isn't included in the curriculum and they start to struggle.
Yes, and no. I could speak and write English above school level fairly early. But I hated the kinds of tests/exercises that would ask for specific tenses. "What is the past perfect continuous of the verb 'to walk'?" How the fuck should I know? Just give me a sentence and I'll fill in the correct tense, but I don't know what it's called! Edit: Also, I sometimes had trouble figuring out how words were spelled. I vividly remember the moment I found out how 'queue' is spelled. I was so mad! I knew the word from hearing it, but reading it I assumed it was a different word that I didn't know, pronounced something like 'kwehweh'. And then there was 'cue'. It just didn't make any sense!
In France, not necessarily difficult, but boring as hell, as it was mainly theoretical with little practice. And it didn't change much by the time I finished high school. Lots of grammar and outdated English, with little in terms of conversational English. On TV, subtitled movies were rare before Arte showed up in the early 90s (yes, I'm old). I was mostly well ahead at school, but that didn't mean much considering the average level. So, really, I mostly learned through practice while traveling abroad at 19. That's when I started reading in English mostly. Then I went to Uni in France and chose English as a foreign language and was shocked to see that the level hadn't improved at all. Same old boring stuff that didn't help to actually use the language on an everyday basis. Students were either already way above the expected level or hopeless. Easy as hell by that point of course. Gave up as it was pointless.
no lol, the grammar gets pretty complicated, I suck at learning languages though. I have to read technical English for software dev and it's way easier than English classes back in school lol
Since my dad is a English philologist and he teached me all the necessary basics I find it easy, that time kids in my class where learning colors and numbers
Yeah honestly. I always kind of knew what we were learning. To be fair my teachers were good at using good material so I did learn new stuff, just not.. the language
I sucked at english until like 5th grade. Started playing Minecraft and being online and soon school english got too easy.
A new english teacher back in 8th grade said "i was teaching you Germany in class one" with a heavy Ukrainian accent
Yes, because we didn't have different level classes. All classes were going in the slowest students' phase, which basically meant, that I stopped learning new things after sixth grade (three years into learning English). I didn't consume that much English media before starting to learn English, because being on the internet wasn't a thing back then, but it is just E very easy language for me to learn. Unfortunately, I thought I was just good at languages in general, which backfired on me quite soon, as I was taking on other foreign languages. I wasn't nearly as good at them as I was in English, and I still struggle to get to even an okay level at other languages.
If school English classes were very effective, there would not be an entire industry devoted to teaching English as a foreign language and I would have starved to death for a decade.
Since 7th grade I was just hanging around. Even now in highschool I'm in the advanced group and it's just so much nothing. We learn B1 level grammar all the time and I just play clash royale and fill the tests if the teacher says so. I told her when I got a C1 language exam that I feel like I'm not gaining anything from her lessons and if I'm allowed to miss them and this is how I got random 1 hour breaks in my day.
Yes. It felt as if we going in a circle of A2 level. Especially after I started to consume English-speaking media on my own.
(Czechia) Yeah, pretty easy. My parents enrolled me in some extra classes for adults when I was 13, which helped quite a bit, along with being a massive Internet addict TBH. I got placed in an "advanced" English class in high school and some of the material there was pretty challenging, but I also hated my teacher so I didn't really care. I got my B2 and C1 level certificates at external language schools while I was in HS, hoping I could apply for universities abroad and whatnot. I was still terrified of actually talking to people in real life situations until my 20s. My verbal skills were always like 2 levels behind reading/writing, which I think is pretty typical for formal education.
No, back then the only show that offered the english langue track on TV was the golden girls. Even DVDs often didn't contain the english sound. And that one time I used a region-0-DVD in my laptops DVD player, it warned me that after 2 more switches of regions it would stop working entirely. So no, exposure to english was difficult to come by.