I know learning English is a big priority for many non gb European kids. I was wondering how does your country teach English? Do you focus more on speaking or writing? What were some activities that helped you learn? Where I’m from we take Spanish class everyday for 5 years and most still can’t speak near fluency. I’ve noticed the same trend in Canada, the uk and Australia. What are we doing wrong?
What makes us good in English is using the language. That’s how you learn one, you use it.
Especially these days with the internet it’s so easy to use a language like English. I use it literally every day online. If you want to get better in Spanish, go over to some Spanish internet forums or whatever and start chatting.
We’re exposed to it constantly, because we don’t dub movies and tv-shows.
We start learning it in school when we’re very young (5th grade back in my day, but now even younger), and keep learning it until 11th grade. The first couple of years are for the basics, the rest are for advanced grammar and vocabulary building.
Can we asume that the universal answer to that question is Cartoon Network and movies with subtitles + school, where we learned to write?
My mom is from Northen Ireland and always spoke English to me and my sister growing up. When we were little she would personally make us practice reading and spelling in English. I always had a huge advantage because of this but still, speaking English only at home with your mom is not really enough, I didn’t have the same proficiency of native speakers who speak English all the time at all.
I remember that around the age of 15 I made a point to seriously work on improving my English, so I did. In Italy everything is dubbed, so to hear English you’ve got to actively look for it, and that’s what I did: when using streaming services I stopped picking the dubbed version of tv shows and movies, I only used to watch Italian youtubers so I started watching English speaking ones too and above all I was constantly making notes of words and phrases. Like seriously, all the time. When I was watching things in English I would constantly pause them to make notes of phrases I wasn’t familiar with or of new words. I would also spend time randomly looking up vocabulary by translating Italian words on Google translate. Often when an Italian world or expression I didn’t know the English translation came to mind I’d either look it up right away or if I couldn’t I would write it down and a make a point to look it up later.
With time I started to need that less and less, but I never fully dropped the habbit…just last year when I was watching Orange Is The New Black I was still either pausing and taking notes or taking screenshots of the subtitles every now and then.
I think if all I did was learning what we learn in school I wouldn’t be fluent in english. I watch every movie in english, read english books, read and write English comments on Reddit, talk to english speaking people while playing games… the biggest problem I have is my damn phone autocorrecting everything to german and YouTube auto enabling german subtitles even though my phone and all my devices are set to English. Annoying af xD i even import anime Blu-rays from the UK because all streaming services in germany only offer German/Japanese
Imo speaking/listening is alot more useful than learning in school
Since we’re a smaller country with a smaller language, a lot of our media is never translated to Swedish so we’re exposed to English often and throughout our whole lives. Especially for someone like me who spends a lot of time on the internet and playing video games.
I can’t give any credit to school, they teach what I already knew years before.
Firstly school, TV shows, YouTube, in general internet and last but not least travelling. All together makes it perfect for learning any language. Unfortunately I succeeded only in English lol
Here in the Netherlands, kids usually start early with learning the language. Our first contact with the english language usually comes from Dora (we learn english instead of spanish). After this, we learn a lot at schools pretty early on. Then there’s also the fact that apart from children shows, barely anything get’s translated into Dutch, so we are forced to watch almost any film or series in english.
Video Games, non-subtitled/non-dubbed Cartoon Network shows until I was about 7 or 8, and then I got private English classes for a few years because at my time public school didn’t offer English for those ages, which helped me formalise the grammar concepts and write more consistenty.
And, through it all, English shows and movies since we never really dub stuff over here, and internet just carried me over the rest.
I still think that there’s a fundamental missing experience from native English speakers’ childhood which is to transverse a whole RPG game in a language you know nothing about. It took us a full school year to collectively understand/finish pokemon red at my elementary school. Fucking random twitch did it faster!
English is an important subject in schools but we have very low English profiency. The reason is: They don’t go too far. They teach you just the basics. Vocabulary, grammar and listening. Almost no speaking. You start learning present tense, past tense at 4th grade and you still learn the exact same things at highschool too. How I learned it, is: Watching PewDiePie. Yep. A YouTuber.
5th and 6th grade is learning grammar and after that it’s mostly just like “language” class in native speaking countries.
Meaning we read texts or books, analyze them and generally just learn about the culture about the anglosphere. Just in english.
I had a great teacher in primary school, really a wonderful person and an excellent teacher. She taught all the classes in the school and literally everyone’s favourite subject was English thanks to her. This made it easier to understand English in secondary school and high school. The constant exposition to English on the internet helped a lot too.a
During high school (Gymnasium) I went on a student exchange year to the US. During that year, my English fluency improved dramatically. I also did a lot for it though. During the first 5 months, I refused ANY and all contact with people back home. I refused to read my friends’ emails or write them back, I refused to talk to my parents or siblings on the phone etc. I decided to not speak, hear, write or read a single word of Swiss/German. So… I was pretty hardcore about it.
After 5 months I experienced my first dream in English. That, along with my mom’s increasing worries about me eventually made me break my rule of no contact (originally I had planned to break off contact for the entire year). However, even after that I kept my communication with friends and family back home at an absolute minimum. At the same time, I studied English wherever and whenever I could. I asked my host parents about the meanings of certain words, asked fellow students to correct my grammar when I spoke etc. I think most people considered that side of me a bit annoying (understandably so) but I believe it really made a big difference.
Once my exchange year was finished, I returned back home to do my last year of high school. After graduating from high school in Switzerland, I went back to the US and lived there for another 6 months. During those 6 months I visited a language school which prepared me for the Cambridge Proficiency Certificate exam (which I then took and passed).
After returning from America once again, I enrolled at university and majored in English linguistics and literature. I continued my English ling/lit major once I entered the Masters level.
One thing I know from studying English on an academic level is that most people who seem proficient on the internet are not actually proficient in a wider sense of the word. The thing about video games, movies and internet forums is that they seem to teach you tons of stuff but most of the English you learn this way is very conversational, everyday life English. A lot of people call themselves fluent, not realizing that writing a comment in an internet forum and writing an academic paper in English are two completely different things. English is often touted to be an exceptionally easy language to learn. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. English is in fact an incredibly complex and complicated language, even if you approach it from a closely related language such as German.
My method of learning:
English TV/Films (subtitles) → English videogames → Hanging out on the Internet → English studies in school (4th grade → University level)…
Nintendo and Monty Python did more for my English skills than school ever did 
As we are a small country, we are constantly immersed in English speaking media, without dubbing which helps a lot for getting a natural feel for the language. Having a native language that is one of the closest relatives of English also helps a lot - Scandinavian grammar and vocabulary are very close to English…
Anime subtitles and online games for 98% of my english
Only had Cartoon Network in English.
Then the media I could get my hands on didn’t have any subtitles available, and when they did - they were so crappy I’d sometimes edit and re-share them.
In parallel, trying to write down lyrics, especially when you kinda got what the word was but still had to look it up in dictionary - learning how phonetics get transcribed, a common issue people have with English.
Next big step was Harry Potter, first books I read in English. It’s perfect, because even as native speaker you need to figure out meaning of the words Rowlings made up from context, which is THE key to understanding English.
Next were Pratchett books, and there especially I made a rule NOT to check dictionary bar like 1-2 times when it was the kind of term I assumed would be unfamiliar to native speakers as well.
The key IMHO is to disable subtitles and be OK with not getting a big portion of what is going on.
A lot of practice on the Internet, books video games subbed series…
School reached the basic then I perfected it on my own. It helped a lot that English grammar is really easy.
I learned some vocabulary, writing and grammar from school, understanding written and spoken language from the internet and movies/YouTube, and speaking when I threw myself abroad.
I started practicing listening and reading after ≈5-6 years since I had begun learning English in school, so I already had a solid grasp of grammar. It just required some getting used to how native actually speak English and the fact that they have markedly different accents.
When I started speaking, I had already been able to understand spoken and written English more or less perfectly for like 5 years.
The process has been pretty slow (> 10 years), but I guess it could be more efficient if I began practicing right away instead of “waiting until I was ready”. The truth is, I never was ready, so it doesn’t matter when I should have started. But I didn’t have a lot of motivation in primary school.
I’m GB but lived in North Wales for 18 months as a kid. Primary School was english in the mornings, welsh in the afternoon (or was it the other way round?). After 18 months, I could sing Happy Birthday in welsh (I think we sang it everytime someone had a birthday) and that was about it. I forgot that quickly enough after leaving.
I’ve noticed the same trend in Canada, the uk and Australia. What are we doing wrong?
Lack of engagement with the language in everyday situations. English native speakers can afford to be insular in this regard because the need for engagement isn’t anywhere near as pressing. If you look at certain subculures in the English speaking world you’ll find there is some need for that engagement, so these people do start to learn the relevant language - take anime fans and Japanese, for example. There’s a tonne of stuff that is out there in Japanese that isn’t in English, to access it you need to know japanese. For Dutch people, that same concept is going to apply for virtually everything other than Korfball!