I swear, to you people that speak English as a second language, it never ceases to amaze me at just how perfect your English is.


I'm a white male American that speaks Tagalog, but when I speak or write it you can tell it's not my native language.


But you guys write English like it's your only language. It's perfect. How the heck do you do it?

I'm guessing the massive oversaturation of TV, films and websites in English.

I mean, there's not much of a market for Philippine films in England.

Rosetta Stone?

I have found, during my time here, that if a post is well-written it is most likely to be written by someone for whom English is a second language.

Lots and lots of TV, movies, books. Of course there was that time in Elementary school where they would suspend anyone talking Spanish so that was a thing. But then there's the thing of most of my family not speaking English so I got stuck in between, not good at either one.

Also English is one of the easier languages, aside from some weird grammatical things that no one I speak with can agree on.

There is no way that I would write in Spanish, the number of accents and trying to figure out where they belong is insane.

As for speaking I'm so used to switching between languages on the fly too, something that I keep forgetting that people up here don't speak Spanish. So..whoops.

Definitely not Rosetta Stone, although I can only speak for myself.

?

By the time I started studying it formally, I already had a decent vocabulary. The media definitely helps, but I think it was my willingness to expose myself to it that helped me the most, my curiosity.

?

?The more I learned, the more I became aware of translation errors made by others and that, in turn, made me want to expose myself even more to the source material, to the original language.

I think that is the key to learn any language. They require a mixture of knowledge and experience. The knowledge part is relatively easy: just get a good course or teacher. The experience takes time and effort, especially if you pick a language that isn't all that popular. That's also why I find English relatively easy to learn. It's not the language itself that is easy, it's its popularity that makes it easier for many people to get accustomed to hearing and reading it - often without even wanting to, in fact.

Everything is in english. You're bound to pick a few things up

False, we do a pack with Cthulhu to pick things up.

Foreign language teaching in Britain kind of svcks. It's based on how they used to teach Latin, so learning French is taught by memorising huge lists of grammatical cases for each individual word long before you ever actually try to make sentences out of them. From what I've heard of English teaching in France, they focus on teaching a wide vocabulary first, and then teaching the boring grammar after they've built up a good base of translatable words.

Heh, and I've found that if a post is extraordinarily poorly written, it is most likely to be written by someone from whom English is a first language. Or at least their IP tend to go to the US