Everyone seems so good at English so I wondered how many people learned it to such proficiency and how many are just natives

  • kubofhromoslav@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    I learnt it since I was 3. I was literally forced to do it instead of playing outside with my friends. And always out was hard…

    Then I found the language Esperanto, that is supposed to be 10x easier to learn and use. I tried it and I can conform that to be true 😊

    But I needed English for my (volunteer) work in a social movement, so I slowly learn it. But still had big problems to understand spoken English. Then I found English videos about topic that was very investing for me. I was trying hard to understand and finally I did.

    Long story short, I still prefer to speak Esperanto, and much more people should, IMO.

    • myszka@lemmy.mlOP
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      11 hours ago

      Oh wow, it’s so cool you speak Esperanto! Can you share your experience with it? Where do you use it? What good Esperanto communities are there? Do you find it actually useful? In what ways did it enrich your life?

      • Fondots@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        I’m also in the process of learning Esperanto (there’s actually a decent amount of us on Lemmy)

        I don’t foresee it ever being particularly useful on its own, but it is a really easy language to learn, and I think it’s a great way to learn how to learn languages. I feel like after casually teaching myself it for a few years I’m a lot better prepared to learn another language somewhere down the road

        There’s a few Esperanto clubs and such out there, I’m not a part of any of them so I can’t really comment on the community all that much.

        One thing that does kind of interest me is Pasporta Servo, which is sort of a free Airbnb/couchsurfing thing for esperantists. Seems like that could be a cool way to travel around on the cheap and probably a good way to get more involved in the Esperanto community. Unfortunately most of my traveling is done with my wife and I haven’t been able to convince her to learn Esperanto with me so I doubt she’s gonna want to go hang out with me chatting with someone in a made up language in a foreign land.

        Mostly I talk to my dog in it. She knows most of her basic commands in both English and Esperanto.

      • sudoer777@lemmy.ml
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        2 hours ago

        BTW a lot of open source programs have Esperanto translations (including Lemmy). Facebook does also for some reason.

    • SlurpingPus@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      For spoken English, I greatly recommend audiobooks and podcasts. They typically have better narrators, so are easier to understand. As a bonus, one can listen to them while doing household chores and such — for me, consumption of books greatly increased with audiobooks compared to snatches of books here and there.