English: fluent enough for hobbies and casual conversation
Japanese: basic. Learned from college class for 2 years, watched anime forever. Mada mada desu yo!
Taiwanese Hokkien: know a little. Grandma only knows this one, not so much of Mandarin. It’s a bit hard to talk to her or understanding what she says. Don’t worry, we still love each other.
Nah, would be extremely hard. The only reason I was able to learn English was because I was glued to the TV, Cartoon Network to be exact, ever since my parents bought a colored TV when I was around 4. At that age I also learned English words / songs in pre-kindergarten. I was able to memorize the words and the meanings by some of the gesture or events in cartoons. Old Hanna-Barbera cartoons are a good example.
By the third grade in school, when they started teaching English, I was already a “pro” at speaking.
English (as fluent as my native language I’d say),
And I am currently learning Italian. It started as a passion, but got more intense as I found a romantic interest.
Learning languages is fun, I think. And I want to keep going after Italian as well. I have a rather intense list of languages I want to be able to speak, including Spanish, German & some languages of the East.
What is a bit fun with me though, and that I am quite proud of, is that I am legally deaf - yet I have always had quite the ear for languages, I mean… That sounds like an impossible combination.
Never understood how people learn languages by watching or reading something.
Maybe I’m oldschool and trust in standard learning. School, college, courses…
I think that’s because of motivation purposes. It works for me. Hobbies are the reason I got to learn English. Grand Theft Auto series didn’t have official Chinese version until GTAV, so I used to learn the language by constantly going bowling with my cousin.
I watch anime with original voice over, too. Realistically, Japanese don’t speak like anime characters. But you get to learn a few phrases from it.
English, and Spanish profanity. Have wanted to learn each foreign language Resident Evil has used since 4 so I can understand what talking enemies are shouting at me.
I recently found something relating to this. If you are interested you might want to look out for the hole in the wall experiments.
Here’s a TED talk:
I’m not sure how accurate this is to actual learning but from what I understand from the talk most children do not need formal education to learn something properly as long as they have access to resources like books, movies, the internet, etc.
I also found another video from someone who learned English from Runescape:
English: native
Russian: don’t know what level I’m at technically but I’ve been studying it everyday for 2 years. it’s a beautiful, complicated language