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Post by Deleted on Dec 29, 2011 11:18:17 GMT -5
I have a question: how long did it take you to get a working knowledge of English? To compare, after 14 years of working on Spanish, I managed to forget nearly everything.
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Post by VenomFang on Dec 29, 2011 18:10:41 GMT -5
Paging Mandarian Dessert. Time to leave the MLP thread for a minute and answer this man's question.
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Post by Pervy Stone Cold on Dec 29, 2011 18:59:50 GMT -5
Well my dad who is foreign (French) came to America when he was 10 or 11. It depends on your age and how immersed you are in being around people who speak English. He learned in about one year because of TV and basically everyone speaking (he didn't live where others spoke French) English around him.
Immersion is important too. If you, say, speak Spanish but live in America in neighborhoods where people predominantly speak Spanish it does not come as quickly.
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CMWaters
Ozymandius
Rolled a Seven, Beat the Ads.
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Post by CMWaters on Dec 29, 2011 19:00:54 GMT -5
Paging Mandarian Dessert. Time to leave the MLP thread for a minute and answer this man's question. He doesn't wake up and get on here for another 5 hours. I'd be interested to hear the result since I eventually want to learn Japanese myself. |
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agent817
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Post by agent817 on Dec 29, 2011 20:58:38 GMT -5
I have a question: how long did it take you to get a working knowledge of English? To compare, after 14 years of working on Spanish, I managed to forget nearly everything. My Spanish is still poor. I can still understand and talk in some ways, but it's in no way great. Just saying. |
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Tarik Dee
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I loved you before I even ever knew what love was like
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Post by Tarik Dee on Dec 29, 2011 21:22:40 GMT -5
Im not perfect talking in English, but I can read it very well (like 85%) it took me like three or four years just watching TV or listening music in English.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Dec 29, 2011 23:12:20 GMT -5
I grew up learning both. Still, online, when it comes to writing it's English, pero pag nagsasalita ako offline Filipino ang ginagamit ko. Something like that.
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Post by Koda, Master Crunchyroller on Dec 30, 2011 1:17:35 GMT -5
I grew up learning both. Still, online, when it comes to writing it's English, pero pag nagsasalita ako offline Filipino ang ginagamit ko. Something like that. The only words between "English" and "Something" that I understood were "offline Filipino".  The rest is just Lovecraftian gibberish.  |
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Post by Deleted on Dec 30, 2011 1:31:57 GMT -5
Wow, never thought I would get summoned by someone outside of my usual dwelling threads.  Anyway, it is hard to tell: In Grade 4 (elementary school), we started learning English a bit playfully without going too much into grammar. Then, it began to be taught systematically in Grade 5 (Junior High) from which it went until senior high school. What helped me was that I developed an interest into foreign languages (through an anime series named "Captain Future") which in turn led me to watch movies and series in their respective original language (back when that was a chore since DVDs were not out yet and the Internet was not fully developed). Another thing that helped was something that a university professor of mine said in a consultation with me that I have a "parrot brain", meaning I can easily memorize stuff, thus most of everything I read somewhere gets soaked up like a sponge. Thinking about it, I seem to have worked up a working knowledge in grade 11 (senior high, age 17-18) at the latest since I was told I had a very strict English teacher there where only people who took a trip abroad for a year at least got good grades. I had been two weeks in England and three weeks in the US before that and wrote Bs/A-s in his exams. So that's that. One important thing to note is that I think your knowledge of a language and its upgrade/downgrade depends on how much you have to do with that language on a day-to-day basis. With English, I visit English-language websites daily and watch media (books, movies, TV) in their original language (which happens to be English most of the time) so I have daily contact with it. The same mostly with Japanese hearing Japanese news broadcast and watching anime in Japanese. But as for my French, it is at a low level now because I never come into contact with anything French daily. How much you use it from day-to-day is an important factor IMHO in if you can keep a working knowledge of a foreign tongue. |
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