I was just wondering about all the Europeans (excluding UK)… like do y’all understand… say, an American movie or TV as well as those in your national language?
Fluent enough that Americans think I’m Canadian, Canadians think I’m British, and brits think I’m Texan.
same, but australians think I am from new zeland, sometimes I play with accents mimicking certain dialects just for fun
Germany: I speak english better than many politicians. I am more than fluent i would say And yes ofc i undetstabd tv and movies lol
who’s
whose
how fluent
:-P
Fluenty enough to know it isn’t who’s but whose. But not enough to properly understand a movie or a tv show. So the worst of both worlds.
It varies a lot from person to person among those who are bilingual, and even from era to era. I’m Honduran, for context. I had nearly natively fluent English when I came out of high school and began working at a call center, mostly because I played an MMO for years and spent days and nights in Skype calls with groups of people from all over the world, most of which were native English speakers. Everyone else on the call center was astounded at how good my English was, and it was indeed miles better than anyone else in the office.
Then, I started university, it was predominantly taught in Spanish, everyone spoke Spanish, and I stopped playing MMOs and spending all day on Skype calls. I very clearly remember the transition, where I had trouble speaking Spanish quickly because I was so used to English, to now having to think for a second what I want to say in English before saying it in a less than perfect accent, while my Spanish now flows quite easily. My Spanish and my English essentially swapped places (to where they should’ve always been, if you ask me). I now believe this had a noticeable impact on my social life when I was young, I was too shy to talk in Spanish but the shyness would fade away completely if I held the conversation in English. Thankfully, spanglish became a predominant way of speaking now and everyone is happy lmao.
Content consumed did little difference, I believe. I never stopped consuming content in English. Still do, I spend too much time on Youtube and 99% of what I watch is in English, but my English will never be as good as it was back in those MMO days. Daily practice with native speakers makes all the difference in the world. I now have friends with better English than I had in my golden years, but since they work for Brits or Aussies, they have that accent, and I can’t tell the latino bits out of them at all, they could fool me if I didn’t know any better.
Edit: education here is not good. I had classmates on senior year who couldn’t read out of a reading book, at ALL. I’ve heard similar stories from even the most prestigious schools in the city. My school would pride itself on having some american teachers at some point, but that was history by the time I rolled through, so my English was 100% a gamer skill.
It’s pretty good. I normally consume all english content in its original language.
German here, usually fluent enough to understand movies and tv shows unless the characters have poor pronunciation or a heavy accent. Also old english Shakespearean fancy words sometimes give me trouble. I consume most media (YouTube, games, etc) in English.
I’m Dutch and I speak fluent English. Not because “all Dutch people speak good English” but because I have a Master’s in English language and I lived in the UK for 30 years.
My job is fixing terrible English written by Dutch people who think they speak good English (and that includes government ministers).
Native English speaker, but I’ve visited India, so I have a different, related topic. Of course, there’s two caveats: I have an outsider’s perspective and the British have a very lengthy history with the region. In major cities, spoken English seems as popular as Hindi. In Delhi, signs seemed to be entirely in English, although maybe I just didn’t notice the Devanagari script as much because it’s incredibly foreign to me. Kolkata had less spoken English, but still more English signs than Hindi or Bengal (I can’t tell the difference). Traveling to rural West Bengal, the advertisements have skewed towards Bengali (I believe) and road signs are dual language, but but I don’t think I’ve seen a single business sign that didn’t have English as the primary text.
I thought it was silly that English and Chinese became the main languages in Firefly (which, for the show, was English with Chinese words thrown in). Now I realize, not only is that possible, but it’s already here. English is the global standard for air traffic control and imperialism has pushed language influence far and wide. International business has made English effectively a requirement for competitiveness. I was just oblivious as an English-only speaker at the time. I’ve wondered if Hindi would now be a more accurate 2nd language for the Firefly future, but I’m not convinced because of how prevalent English is there, like it might have already reduced the power of Hindi on the global scale. Plus, there’s so many dialects there, Hindi is the most common but it doesn’t have a majority
An American movie or TV show I would probably have the same level of understanding as my native language, even on references, puns, etc… English from any other nation, not to the same degree, but I’d say comparable to an american. Speaking I would say I would be quite far off. I’d say I speak a sort of “Erasmus English”, meaning I have almost exclusively had conversations with Europeans, none of which native to english. That means we borrow words which may be common to us, but not english, or accidentally apply our native grammatical rules to english.
French, I watch and read almost nothing in French. I never use French dub.
Irish accent kicked my ass the couple times I went there. Scottish accent was tough too. I worked with people speaking with an Indian accent without much issues.
No issue in US, Canada, England.
I’ve been consuming English media for many years. My computer and phone have used English since the 90s. I got used to it, so today, even if I could switch my phone to my native language, I don’t, it sounds strange.
These days I consume most media in English (US, UK, AU) - movies, tv shows, YouTube, websites, books (paper, audiobooks). I have no trouble understanding content, but I do keep subtitles on out of habit, and that helps when there’s a stronger accent.
I’ve been using English at work exclusively for more than 10 years, and where I live now, I hang out with an international crowd. We speak English to each other, even though it’s not anyone’s first language most of the time.
I take notes and journal in English, even privately. I sometimes even think in English.
I still have an accent and I’m missing some vocabulary and the occasional grammatical rule, but I consider myself fluent in English.
I’m pretty much a fluent English speaker. My native tongue is Dutch
There are certain sayings, phrases or slang that I may not be intimately familiar with. And sometimes I can’t think of a word that I really should have known and I need to look it up (but I get that in Dutch too)
But generally my thoughts are in English, when I speak English, which I think is a decently good sign of fluency.
Following movies is no problem, but I still prefer to have English subtitles under them in case I miss anything. Watching with subtitles is just something I’m used to anyway, because most movies in the NL are not dubbed, but rather the OG language (often English) with Dutch subtitles
I also speak a bit of French and German, but I’m nowhere near fluent in those.
There are certain sayings, phrases or slang that I may not be intimately familiar with.
This says nothing about your fluency. There are tonnes of English slang that Americans are unfamiliar with, and vice versa.
Hell, there’s a lot of Singaporean English that doesn’t exist in the minds of Brits and Americans, but Singaporeans are still fluent in English, it’s just different from what people consider “true” English.I also speak a bit of French and German, but I’m nowhere near fluent in those.
Top Flemish linguist confirmed!!
Just a regular Dutchman from the Netherlands, actually. I got all four languages in school, and got quite a bit of exercise in French as a kid, so some of it stuck with me.
German is similar enough to Dutch that you can mostly bluff your way through it after highschool.
I can sometimes come across as a native speaker. The accent goes all over the place, australian, south african, brittish.
My wife is from a non English speaking country and her English is better then my Australian English.
I was more of thinking of like people who learned English in their non-English country simply because its Lingua Franca, not as in immigrants.
As in: a someone that just learned it from going online and like browse social media / forums, and watching movies but never stepped foot inside a native-English-speaking country
Cuz that really would be impressive
As a native English speaker foreigners often have better technical English because they have to learn the actual rules of grammar properly
We don’t actually get a thorough education in America for our own language. Some people do but most just get the basics and the rest is on us to absorb
Meanwhile, my mom still says: “I today went to the store” (from 我 今天 if you don’t change the order it’s “I today”, lolz) and she changes between “he” and “she” between sentences for the same person lol, it almost sounds like misgendering someone
And like “Why you no [do X thing]” (because it’s 为什么 你 不 --> “why you no”)
Whatever, doesn’t really matter, it’s understandable, abeit funny to hear; immigration officials approved citizenship so it must be good enough. Good enough to do bussiness here… so… whatever
It’s funny how sometimes one word changes the entire sentence and other times it has basically no effect at all
Can actually mess up quite a few words and still successfully communicate which I think is just great
Not sure how flexible other languages are about that kinda stuff
My wife did lean it in her home country I’m the one that moved to a non English speaking country.







