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how did you learn English..


URA BOAT

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their are many people from other countries that speak english..but i dont understand how did they learn it...did they learn it in school or did have to get privet tutors..or dose every one know english...and is it just me that thinks that only English(British) and Americans(USA) speak english...

:blink:

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I started learning English in kindergarten when I was about 5 or 6 years old. Unfortunately, after 4th grade all my English teachers were rubbish so I have my enthusiasm for books to thank regarding my vocabulary and such :) Also, TV shows and movies helped a lot!

Edited by hedwig
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Well, I have never had good English classes at school till now (IB). I always had classes after school, in groups, not individual ones. You just have textbooks and learn...from basics like 'Good morning. I am...', 'orange, apple...' (Kindergarden, first year of primary school), to some more difficult things. Later on you just read some books, talk with some ppl, watch movies etc ;) You just learn it like any other foreign language :P. It's sad like some native English speakers think that it's not needed to learn a foreign language. Until the time I'll be looking for a job I hope I'm gonna speak two or three foreing languages. English is not enough imho, now everybody learns it.

There are sooo many advantages of knowing as many languages as possible. It is said that you cannot really get to know a culture and people without knowing their language.

Sometimes I wonder...it's just so peculiar that so many things depend on where you were born and that...I don't know, just this thing that we have so many things in common and still we all speak so many different languages :).

Besides that there are many places where English is the mother language, I guess it has its advantage that it's not that difficult. I mean, I guess it must be quite a challenge to learn for example Polish as a foreign language.

Edited by lilianna009
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I went to language school from the age of 7 (though I had had some English classes prior) and continued up to the age of 13. Then, in middle school, I had quite a good English classes so I gave up on lang school. Before my exams to pre-IB, my parents got me a tutor and I have lessons with him for an hour a week up to now, plus, of course, IB English at school. I learnt English using Helen Doron method which tries to resemble the natural process of a child learning their own language, we were not allowed to speak Polish during the lessons, had to listen to CDs twice daily and, naturally, learned English without too much effort. However, even though I was able to speak fluently after such courses, I had enormous problems with grammar (writing I learnt through reading) so my tutor had a hard time preparing me for the primarly grammar-based pre-IB exams. :D

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

My parents taught me and of course school and reading books and watching tv. They raised me speaking english and i don't even know my own mother tongue (konkani) because my dad wasn't so good at it so they thought what the hell, let's all speak in english with them. I kinda hate it and like it. Like it because my english is fluent and allowed me to take english HL :P but hate it because i don't know konkani, and it's such a cool language lol and hard in my opinion. I've been through english speaking schools my whole life. But, I know 2 other languages apart from english, kiswahili (learnt at home and taught in school) and french (taught in international curriculum).

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You forgot Hong Kong and Singapore. Well... not so much HK, but Singapore. My parents were from Singapore so I have fluent English. We now live in Hong Kong, loads of people here take English Lit/LL and do well, even if it's not their first language. I have a friend who can beat 99.9% of you in English (getting a 7 in Lit is an absolute certainty for him) but as far as I know he grew up here in HK. From my experience, just reads lots and lots of books... I finished LOTR when I was seven, that's how much of I bookworm I am, I assure you that helps a lot.

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