English as a Second Language · 1:57am Jul 29th, 2014
So, I'm curious as to how many of you guys speak a language other than English as your first language.
My first language is Spanish.
Hence why I sometimes use random words that sound like I was searching the dictionary for their meaning, such as 'supercilious(1)' which confused a certain supercilious Writer here a while ago.
Turns out my education in English included a LOT of memorizing words and their meanings in English... we used to have a... a thing... called: "The Brown Folder" and it was pretty much a school-printed dictionary with the ultimate and nefarious purpose of expanding our vocabulary with words we had not even learned in our own language.
That was followed by a lot of grammar and endless exercises in punctuation, tenses and such. Our education was very formal as well; while we studied the purpose of contractions, we were expected to write down the words separately unless the exercise demanded otherwise. I guess it was just to 'prove' that we knew what they were.
In my case, I loved the English language. Not only did I tend to ace all my tests (math... was another story), I also went beyond and took extra levels in it: I took an English Proficiency test from Cambridge, followed by going out of my way to complete the CELTA. Just because I loved it. That was followed by studying a BA in Creative Writing and English Literature followed later an MA in Children's Lit.
Funnily enough, had I had a peer group like here in Fimfic.net, I would have mastered so much more of the language than I have... along the way, in between writing I really lost a lot of self-critical abilities and until I got back into it, I didn't really start getting the actual improvements I have made so far.
In part, this is why I am so critical of people that use "I speak another language" or "English is my second language" as an excuse to NOT attempt to fix the problems they might have when writing or expressing themselves. I'm not saying I expect everyone to love another language, but if you've gotten far enough in it you want to write it... why not try and improve?
When I finally learn German, I will heed the advice of native German speakers when it comes to fixing my grammar. Because me communicates not okay try if not.
So, any more English as a Second Language users? What are your stories?
If you don't, and you try to write in it, why are you so upset when people call you out on it?
Learning halfway is not learning at all.
Honestly, that pushes my buttons too, though I'm a native speaker.
I never would have realized you're ESL without this - that's amazingly awesome! If only more people made the effort to learn, think of all the printing costs the US could save by not printing every form in English and Spanish...
Everyone's first language is gas. No exceptions.
I am a Malaysian and I speak English better than my native language.
Guess I improve my English a little too much. 
2324559 I'm assuming that's a general 'you', right?
2324572
.............Maybe
(Yes)
Wow I never would have guessed English was your second language. No offense to any of the other writers on this site who weren't raised on English, but you don't tend to make a lot of the mistakes with tenses and spelling like they do.
My first language was AMERICAN!
But really, it was a long time before I figured out English was your second language and it's still a little hard to believe, considering how good yours is. Also, nice to see someone else learning German, it's a fun language.
I am mexican (hence i speak Spanish). so i live in México (doesn't mean i want to live here... forever), obviously i speak English as a second language (though i have 3 years speaking it, i'm not really that good
) and i'm actually going to learn German after i improve my English 
I now challenge you to read The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité aloud as proof of your mastery of the english language.
It's Discord's favorite poem.
I'm Filipino, and I speak English way better than Tagalog, granted, I was raise in CA, the state of hot people. Surfers, Hollywood, and beaches.
2324682
Same, I'm Filipino, and speak English better than either Tagalog or Bisaya,
Native German here.
Got my first dose of English in school and flunked pretty much every test because that was two years "vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary", some grammar and little to no speaking/listening exercises.
Things got better after I discovered how much better Terry Pratchett is in the original. Seriously, whoever translates those has had a complete humor transplant. I'd guess the donor was a tree. That plus Monty Python and BFBS completely ruined school English for me. Went from 4- (D-) to 2 (B) in a quarter of a year.
So "success despite education" for me.
On a note for "learning German from a native".
Be very, very careful with that. Most people would not know their grammar if it jumped them in the face to strangle them. Especially after the wave of "simplifications" they made to orthography some years ago. Suddenly everything is all "Chill out. You can't put rules on language, man."
Well, yes. Language evolves. But either "wegen" requires a genitive or you sound like an uneducated bum. Your choice.
You are a bad man!
It is not terribly uncommon for people who learn a foreign language to be more knowledgeable of the workings and quirks of the written language than people who were born to it. When I was younger, I took Portuguese lessons and clearly remember noticing certain differences between test scores of students currently learning the language, and students who had been born to it. Naturally, the speaking scores of those who spoke Portuguese as a first language were much higher than those who spoke it as a second language. The writing tests, however, more often than not showed the opposite.
Anyway, in my case, I'm from Uruguay, so my first language is also Spanish. I went to a English-Spanish bilingual school, but I learned a lot of my English from other sources, such as video games, movies, books, and random stuff in the Internet. I'd say TV Tropes and a particular Role Playing Forum had a large impact on the way I read and wrote English.
Towards the last years of high school, I just slept through all the "English as a Second Language" classes for the IB program. It was also supposed to be preparing us for the Proficiency, but there wasn't really anything new I was being taught. I took it a year earlier than the rest of the class to get it off my back and was very smug around some of my classmates when I got an A out of it
.
And now I'm studying at a university in LA, so the investment seems to have payed off. By this point, my written English is better than my written Spanish.
Danish is my first language. Shocking, i know.
The funny thing is, i more or less taught myself English. We had an awful teacher in my school. A nice lady, but she didn't understand how to teach children, and consistently treated us like we were five years younger than we were. By the time we graduated public school, which we do after 9th grade, half of my class could barely translate a sentence properly.
When i was around ten or eleven years old, i started playing Runescape, and that's were i got most of the rudimentary understanding of the language. From there i started understanding more and more English from the television, and then i started reading it. Now, around 80 % of what i read is in English ( if you include pony fics). I also understand Norwegian and Swedish, and occasionally read that as well. I am teaching myself French at the moment, and my current goal is finishing a French copy of Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka that i picked up at a yard sale.
I have always been an avid reader ( my father started me on Donald Duck comics when i was six-ish, and it just went from there), and languages in general just fascinates me. I doubt I'll be taking any bachelors or masters in it, though.
It is "technically" my second language since my grandmother only spoke Chinese, and the rest of my family tended to speak in Chinese anyways while at home. Made me hopelessly lost when I went to preschool (or so I've heard. I remember nearly nothing). However, there was a classmate who spoke both, and he helped translate for me until I figured it out. Since all of this was still during the phase where young children picked up languages really easily, I effectively knew both. Ended up using English a lot more in the end, though.
On that note, I always wanted to
1) get a bunch of different languages to be spoken at a young child
2) Try to get a child to talk to dolphins.
I worry someone might be opposed to this.
Mexican here, so Spanish, learned english in elementary school and refined it by living in the US for two years, then came back to Mexico. Reading a lot actually helps to develop your language skills in whatever language you're reading, and I do read a lot........and when I say a lot I mean A LOT, so I actually adapted pretty fast, it does help that now I want to read everything in english, and do almost everything in english while in the web, now I even think mostly in english, such is life.......shame I can't actually practice speaking it 'cause almost no one I know speaks it very well. By the way, learning that the writter of "The sweetie Belle Chronicles" has Spanish ,wherever they are from, as their frist language, makes me feel pretty damn good.
ESL here, first language is Spanish. Its the only language my parents speak since they never bothered to learn English.
2324708 My family only speaks Tagalog, English, and some Illocano, I might have misspelled the last one. I mean, I can speak a few words of Tagalog, but that's it, thankfully, a number of them are derived from Spanish, which my school has as a mandatory class.
I speak Dothraki.
My first language was baby. Now it is English, but only because everyone forced me to learn it. Pricks. >:[
Mine's slightly complicated. I learnt spoken mandarin (and a little bit of hokkien) as a First Language and written English as a First Language and Chinese as "Mother Tongue". Mainly because my parents aren't English speakers.
So basically, I write English better than I can speak it.
When I mention that English is not my first language it's never as an excuse for making mistakes, but rather as a request to be told of any issues, such as strange word choices or funky grammar, in my writing, even if they aren't outright errors
The story about how I learned English starts in a quite unusual way. I started learning it by using, as a child, a self teaching English course meant for adults in order to learn enough English to play Leisure Suit Larry (and, just as important, pass the age check / copy protection without having the game manual, which meant researching the answers for a bunch of college-level multiple choice questions that were presented in a foreign language).
After I learned enough to beat that game I went to other ones — King's Quest, Monkey Island, Space Quest, and so on. I also got into RPG games, and those (together with their companion novels), at the time, were only available in English. When I finally got to learning English at school I could already read quite well, with a large enough vocabulary that the pocket dictionary we were told to purchase was mostly useless for me.
This did have a strange result in my proficiency levels. I could read something as complex as the works of Charles Dickens in my early teens, with near full comprehension; but still had huge issues with writing, had serious trouble understanding spoken English, and was a disaster when it came to actually speaking. Even now I still need subtitles to fully understand even clearly spoken dialog, such as in MLP, my accent is nasty, and I can't do meter or rhyme in English.
I'm still an inveterate reader, of course. While I was getting my Law degree, for example, I read Isaac Asimov's, Terry Pratchett's, and Jim Butcher's full bibliographies, plus the bibliographies of a few less prolific authors and some other assorted books, without that getting in the way of all the reading I had to do for my course.
Russian.
The story of me learning english is a long and convoluted one, but sufficient to say that it began in my childhood, before school and even before kindergarten. In short: my grandfather got me some books full of fairy tales(in russian) and english translations of them. At first he simply had been reading to me those stories alongside each other, explaining alphabet and pronunciation each time until that knowledge got stuck in my head forever, then tried to get me to read english versions and translate them. I was less than enthusiastic, as you could guess. In the end he refused to tell me bedtime stories until I translated at least a couple of paragraphs to english and back each night. =/
After that, english classes at school for the first several years were boring beyond belief and not much changed in the later years or in the university - because by then I had access to internet. Even if my grammar suffered for it, most likely.
As a side note: Ich spreche Deutsche sehr schlecht. Learned some a while ago and promptly forgot most of it. So, good luck to you in learning it. =)
2324896
"Land of the Lounge Lizards" I presume?
I will neither confirm or deny any knowledge about this, but you would not believe how common that motivation was among fourteen-year old boys in the early 1980s.
Or maybe you would.
2324924
My copy was a pirate one because that game, to the best of my knowledge, was never released in the country where I live. But it was readily available, spread around mainly by teenagers
The one difference is that, at the time, I wasn't yet a teenager
English is my 1st and only language, I took classes in school for Spanish but never really picked it up.
I'd love to learn German someday though, supposedly its a tad similar to Norwegian and then I'd cover more than half of my ancestral languages.
Yo, spanish speaker as well. Most of what I know I learned via trial and error. No one ever really held my hand, so my learning english was less of a lesson, and more of a trial by fire.
English is a tool for communication. Not having a decent grasp of the language you are communicating in is like using a paintbrush (not the artist kind, the house painter kind) to write an essay instead of a pen. Yeah you can get the basic message across but it sure as hell won't be elegant.
Of course many native English-speakers write inelegantly, but if you don't have the write tools, you don't even have a chance.
2324642
Thanks for such wonderful link!
2324908
Hey, I have similar story.
Except I've got NES (Dendy, later Sega) and all games came in English. So I had to guess what meant what.
Once I went to school, I wanted to get English asap, so my mom got me a tutor from English class when I was in second grade.
When I've got internet at 14 I instantly began to speak with English speaking people over long nights of gaming. So I have limited knowledge of language (mostly it's grammar) with almost no punctuation.
But the community guides really help in studying things I've never known.
My first language is Spanish... How did I learned English?
Well I start studying the language from the elementary school and my mother is an English teacher... and that's how I didn't learned it. It was actually the comics and subtitled movies, lots of observations and some practice.
Then I started making friends on the internet and chat with them.
Greek is my first, but I learned English from an early age so I speak both fluently.
dose 'insanity' count?
My story is much the same, except for me it's italian instead of spanish
I was raised speaking both French and English (Canadian with a mother from a French-speaking part of Ontario), although I consider English my first language as I use it a lot more, and I am a bit more fluent in it. I do find that I sometimes will accidentally substitute a French word in a sentence, or I will completely forget what the English word for something is.
When writing in French, I tend to make sure I am using the right tense, and I will reference my bescherelle if I am not sure how to conjugate a verb. I make sure to check the dictionary if I don't quite remember the definition of a word, and if I have an oddly worded sentence, I either try to reword it in a way that makes sense, or I ask someone more fluent than me to help.
My first language is Dutch (Belgium) and I speak French and German. My knowledge of English trumps all though.
Spanish.
I went through 12 years of school always having English language courses, but not learning anything beyond vocabulary and basic grammar. Then I went to Canada and learned to speak it in 6 months by forcing myself to sit in front of the boob box and by avoiding too much contact with fellow Latinos.
2324735
I shall refrain from making any comments about the German translation of a book not having humour
But good on ya for reading Pratchett. I love that man's books to death.
My first language is Swedish but thanks to having an English friend since 5th grade I was always better than my peers
My first language is Swedish and it is quite amazing that I became this good at English. My school must have had the worst English education ever when I went there as they didn't start learning us the wery (childish) basics like collours and animals, stuff my little sister learnt in preeschool. Then I switched school to a school for children with special need for extra help in school (I have ADHD). There I tried to catch up with my English and I leart quite a bit but what really made me learn English was me starting to watch Youtube. I had been watching videos dy a Swedish guy called Stamsite but the more I watched the more I realised how noobish and boring he was. So I started to search for better minecraft Youtubers and found X and later Etho (who I still watch). They were English speaking Youtubers and as I watched their videos I started to learn more and more English. Then a coupple years ago I started reading in English on my own as well. Slowly at first but then I became a brony and found fimfiction wich really helped me improve my English reading. And now here I am with a life so surounded by English I sometimes forget how to speak Swedish properly.
My native language is Slovak, English is my second language (and I love that language as well!).
And while my own EN level is probably far below yours, I still completely agree with you for the "English is my second language" excuse - it's okay if you just let someone know why you aren't as good as native speakers (but are willing to get better), but if someone uses it as an excuse for their atrocious usage and doesn't even try to get better.... just no.
First language is dutch.
Second and third are English and German
We get english pretty soon in school. About 2 years after we get the basics of reading and writing in dutch.
German is my third language because I live very close to the border. And since many german people (there are exeptions but I have met far to many who abide by this rule) absolutely don't speak english (or atleast not beyond: a hello where is road at? Before looking at you strangely when you explain) you are kinda forced to learn to speak german.
Russian here.
My parents hired me a great tutor when I was 6 or 7, and that's how I've got the base pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar pinned down. I had the option of going to two schools – one specialized in math and the other in English. The family figured I would learn English by myself later, so math it was.
I was doing quite well for the first two or three years, but nothing too outstanding; then we got an Internet connection.
I started lurking about, reading articles, books, essays, watching movies and TV shows and so on. Then the school started doing an insane amount of exchange programs and international festivals, and attending at least one every year got me a huge speaking boost.
I was basically doing nothing during the English classes for the last five years of school or so, and managed to net myself a few trips abroad via English competitions anyway.
I tried learning German, but since I've skipped a fair share of starting classes, I never really got into it.
Yea, I'm Finnish, and usually our accent is the most idiotic sounding thing in the world. I learned thanks to not only school, but also by spending time on internet and playing games. I use English so much more these days that I might even spend a day not using Finnish, which is a no wonder honestly, all I need is to be home the whole day looking at my computer's screen.
English is... an interesting language... sometimes it makes more sense than Finnish, and sometimes it gets downright silly looking. Some words don't even exist in English that do in Finnish, which means that I need to use god damn 5 words to describe something I could do with A word.
It's a fun language, better than Finnish in my opinion, a lot simpler too (see the image below).
static.fjcdn.com/large/pictures/85/4f/854f1a_5035830.jpg
Swedish, but I get better grades in English.
After being here for so long, it becomes a second nature. Still, I have a lot to learn.
2325464
That... is a lot of conjugations.
2324569
I know the feeling, my teachers and parents get annoyed at me over it.
2324753
Sounds like we had the same English experience, even the same game. My grades in English was low until 9th grade, it skyrocketed with me starting on this site. Lats test I had, I failed ad speaking, spoke to fast for the teacher to put together what I said, else, I got good grades on writhing and reading. A bit sad, but what can you do.
2325390
I have not seen Stamsites videos in a long time, I tend to avoid Swedish now days. If I am going to watch Minecraft, I watch the members of The Creatures.
And, looks like we share the trait of forgetting our Swedish. As well as our mental symptom.
My first language is German. I'm also currently learning Japanese
2325464 Finnish, what the fuck....
Dutch guy here, with the same attitude towards people using the "not my first language" excuse.
First language is Maori, second language is English. It was pretty weird switching from a tribal language to a formal one.
2325500
Oh hey me too. Japanese tomodachi~