What's it like learning English as a second language?

[Elveman]

Well, I'm learning it since 3rd school grade (and even at university) for 12 years. Changing schools and attending university created some difficulty spikes and falls so I had to adapt. My English was not that horrible but not decent either. That was until 2 years ago when I started playing Ace Attorney series, completing one game after another. That has actually buffed my English skills. Then I've realized that I actually enjoy speaking this language, reading it, hearing it. Nowadays, it seems kinda intuitive to me: I read English books, play English games without subtitles, watch English videos perfectly understanding what's going on. The only problem is that these skills need to be supplied almost constantly and that's kinda problematic because we have English lessons only once every two weeks now, and that's clearly not enough to keep skills of speaking on constant level at least.

Main problems for me:
Articles. I don't really know how to use them, relying on my intuition for that.
Present perfect/Past perfect. Russian language has 3 tenses: past, present and future. As present perfect describes a completed action, past is used for that in Russian. That's why it's really hard to distinguish past simple and past perfect/present perfect.
British/American English. Not that big of a problem, actually, but this inconsistency still bothers me as I don't really understand whether I'm using British one, American one or mixing it up.

Anyway, English is a beautiful language and I really enjoy it

 

[SnakeOil992]

Way easier than some people make it out to be.

 

[osm70]

Honestly, English is easier than my language (Czech).

 

[StarTrekVoyager]

English is certainly the easiest language out there in the world. No gender for nouns, almost no conjugation thingies, few irregular verbs compared to French, where 95% of the verbs you use daily have their own rules, etc. Compared to other languages like Spanish, and of course French and Arabic (which I consider being the two most difficult languages to learn out there), English is really a piece of cake.

 

[Plushie]

I was forced to learn english when I was 7 because Pokemon wasn't available in Dutch (still isn't), my mother tongue. I can't remember how hard/easy it was, but I do know it took me a good 10 years of slacking in mmo's and games/movies/forums to get a good grasp, on top of school.

 

[RealityNinja]

English is certainly the easiest language out there in the world. No gender for nouns, almost no conjugation thingies, few irregular verbs compared to French, where 95% of the verbs you use daily have their own rules, etc. Compared to other languages like Spanish, and of course French and Arabic (which I consider being the two most difficult languages to learn out there), English is really a piece of cake.

Not really...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

 

[linkenski]

Easy as hell. I Just played a lot of Runescape when I was 8 and by the time we started taking english lessons in primary school I could already do everything we had to learn over the following year. The final year my teacher told me to stop when I started doing the tasks as he was introducing them lol. I learned by doing and it made it extremely boring to go through the mechanical and trivial ways of learning it. On the flipside I didn't get good grades in grammar and congruency fixing in high school because I tended to skip past it because I was only interested in learning the practical use of the language and not minutiae of how language is put together.

 

[Reyn_the_Insane]

Learnt it in school. The only weird thing is the pronounciation. Just see how even you (not you you, but native English-speaking people) confuse then/than, compatible/compatable, kernel/kernal, etc. That's because you could even write krnl and it would be pronounced the same way as kernel/kernal/whatever. Which is really annoying for people which native language has precise rules to tell how to pronounce stuff. Well ok, we have a lot of rules (like the fact that a "o" isn't pronounced the same if followed by a "n", or if followed by a "u"), but we still have rules. And the second hard thing in pronounciation is long vowels. Coming from a language with no long vowels, it's hard to pronounce "slip" and "sleep" differently without feeling like a retard.

English is the strangest language on this planet. "Colonel" is pronounced kernel.

 

[Xen0]

I´m from Germany and have english classes since second grade I think. Nowadays I have english advance courses in school and I can read/understand it pretty good. My writing and structure might not be the best, but I think I could talk with a native speaker without problems. The only thing I really such in is the pronaunciation of "r". E.g. speedrun sounds like speedhuan, Resident = Wähsident, read = weed... It really sucks and I don´t know how to fix it.

 

[Procyon]

As a Dutch person I wasn't always fluent in English, but I wrote in Engrish. Back then I wrote a lot in English and learnt to improve my grammar on the go (that was also when I was 14), I then wrote better in English. Now I'm almost as good as a native English writing person. Fun fact: Dutch & English are kinda related, so I learnt English easily. My English skills are almost all self-taught, but I don't speak it perfectly yet, and my English is kind of a mix between American English & the British variant.

 

[Cyan]

Russian language has 3 tenses: past, present and future.

I didn't know.
You would have a lot of problem learning french, we have TOO MANY tenses. event French people are not using them.
But I think Russian people are good at learning French. at least, russian people I meet in my town are speaking a good enough French to communicate with us, better than other nationalities.
There are common habits with strangers. some are doing efforts and speak French very fast (poland, romania, portugal, they are the fastest to adapt)
And on the other side, there are lazy people who live in France for more than 30 years and still NEVER do the effort to speak french (people from magreb in general (Tunisia/maroc/algeria)), but France is to blame too, French are lazy and don't speak any other language even when traveling. not even a little effort of speaking english. no doubt France is not well seen by other countries...


edit:
Russian people used to learn French in 19th century, so maybe it's a long time practice and habit?
A lot of russian aristocrat came to South of France for holidays and retirement, we have a lot of Russian house style in Mediterranean border.

I met another Russian girl yesterday and asked her how easy/hard it was to learn french, she said it was hard. But she understood and spoke very well in my opinion. She can communicate without issue.
I'm curious about Russian and would like to learn a little about it.

Not really...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

I would have love to learn that language.
for years, there are rumors that it will be teach taught at European school to become the main European language. but it stays an exotic language.

 

[Byokugen]

I didn't know.
You would have a lot of problem learning french, we have TOO MANY tenses. event French people are not using them.
But I think Russian people are good at learning French. at least, russian people I meet in my touwn are speaking good enough, better than other nationalities.
There are common habits with strangers. some are doing efforts and speak French very fast (poland, romania, portugal, they are the fastest to adapt)
And on the other side, there are lazy people who live in France for more than 30 years and still NEVER do the effort to speak french (people from magreb in general (Tunisia/maroc/algeria)), but France is to blame too, French are lazy and don't speak any other language even when traveling. not even a little effort of speaking english. no doubt France is not well seen by other countries...



I would have love to learn that language.
for years, there are rumors that it will be teach at European school to become the main European language.

*it will be taught :-P
Btw Serbian has 4 past tenses and 2 future ones :-P
Also has 7 Cases of Nouns while English has none(well Saxon genitive)

 

[Cyan]

damn, I felt something was bad but couldn't find my error

 

[SG854]

It is way, way, over 9000 times easier than German, for example.

Making a Dragon Ball Z reference subconsciously.

Im trying to learn Bill Cosby as my third language. Its a branch off of the English language.
It comes from the Germanic languages with origins in Anglo Saxon.
Its a difficult dialect to learn and understand.

 

[AmandaRose]

Mi volas lerni esperanto. I want to learn esperanto. I think I will make it my next challenge in life lol

 

[VinsCool]

English is certainly the easiest language out there in the world. No gender for nouns, almost no conjugation thingies, few irregular verbs compared to French, where 95% of the verbs you use daily have their own rules, etc. Compared to other languages like Spanish, and of course French and Arabic (which I consider being the two most difficult languages to learn out there), English is really a piece of cake.

I agree with you there. French is also my first language, and I do feel that English was a fart to learn. I did learn very late though, blame terrible teachers for this. As of now, it's indeed a lot easier to learn, read, write and also speak, once you get used to it.

I won't lie, even though my French is excellent (always scored very good grades), I have the feeling that my English has become better than my French, and that, remember, is my native language

 

[spotanjo3]

I've always spoken English so I've never found it weird or that hard to grasp but I know that in some places you're required to learn English and I've heard from some people that English is really weird to learn.
For those of you with English as your second language, what was it like learning it? Was it by choice or did you learn it in school?

The same for you if you are in our Europe. We never found it weird or that hard to grasp but know that in some place you're required to learn our language and we also have heard from some people that our country is really weird to learn. No difference. LOL! Really no difference!

The only options I have to learn in my school are Spanish and Mandarin.

Really ? Is "Have to" learn in your school are Spanish and Mandarin? They said you have to ? A must ? Really ?

 

[fatsquirrel]

I'd be down to learn Japanese just so I can read the physical copies of Jojo manga past part 4. The only options I have to learn in my school are Spanish and Mandarin.

Well, you can take Mandarin. It will have some (emphasis on SOME) similar looking kanji which can later make your learning of written Japanese much easier.
Also, you don't need school to learn a language. I learned all my secondary languages via games/movies/music.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

It came naturally to me. I actually started learning it before I even began school, because my dad was married to an American at the time and she taught me a little.
The pronunciation of some words still catches me off guard, because I learn a lot of words from chatting and posting on forums, but that doesn't teach me how to pronounce them, and it's not always obvious from reading the words either.

 

[DavidRO99]

I've always spoken English so I've never found it weird or that hard to grasp but I know that in some places you're required to learn English and I've heard from some people that English is really weird to learn.
For those of you with English as your second language, what was it like learning it? Was it by choice or did you learn it in school?

I learned english by watching youtube videos at around 10.