i long-distance dated a girl when we were high school aged who lived in myanmar. (i sadly lost contact with her years ago when i made new social media accs)
she learned english as a little girl and only spoke burmese with her family and at school. however im assuming she didn’t read or write in it that much and most of the time, spoke to me and her online friends (which would be in english).
i remember google translating “hello, how are you?” or something like that and she told me to please not type in Burmese because she couldn’t read it without using Google translate to find out what i wrote in english.
while she can understand spoken burmese as well as speak it herself (she kinda has to living in myanmar), she can’t read it and told me she struggled in school for that reason.
naturally, she preferred english. i also know of people who speak 2 languages but either can’t read/write the one language and only speaks it or has trouble spelling words.
i think i knew a spanish speaker in the us who spelled words like “como te llamas” as “como te yamas” (not as a slang spelling, he was just trying to spell it)
I dated someone from Mauritius. French is the primary language there. It took months for me to pick up on her accent because her USA English was so good.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s English is much better than his German.
Is that because he’s Austrian and speaks - from what I can gather - the German equivalent of redneck English?
True, but by now he also has an American accent in the mix. Very weird.
I mean he’s been living a lot longer in the US now than his ~ 20 years in Austria
Wacky
This is indeed common in countries that have been “westernized”, in many cases people learn in English since very small age in school because people thought/think knowing English means better career prospects and prefer admitting people to schools that do all English. But in many cases they don’t actually have native English speaking people to teach, so they just end up learning their own version of English, written English will be good, not spoken. And for their native language they’ll know oral language but will be worse at written one. And people that studied in non-english schools will at least know their language better in written form, but depending on their career path (for example all higher level education in science is English) it might change.
And in many cases they have a native language that’s not taught at school at all, and considering the past literacy rate, most of their parents don’t know how to write in their own language at all. So they’ll have to learn the most common language of the country and English (2nd and 3rd language), either type of school they goto, they’ll never understand written form of their native language.
I speak English better than Spanish, despite Spanish being my mother tongue
i always used to think that it was odd that my grandfather’s cousin’s english was so good for a mexican, but never questioned it; i found about 2 weeks ago (and almost 35 years after his death) that the was born and raised in los angeles, but was forcibly deported to mexico the last time the united states did mass deportations like they’re doing right now. he lived out the rest of his life in mexico and most of my cousins had no idea, go figure.
that’s so sad 🫂 im so sorry, he did not deserve that
it worked out okay for him in the end since he got married and had children (and grandchildren) and he also got his citizenship back after a couple of decades of trying; but remained in mexico until his death a few years later.
english is my mother tongue but i’ve been told i speak portuguese better (my dad’s second language as he lived by brazil)
Despite living in a Spanish speaking country and moving out as an adult (18), I think my English could be better than my Spanish.
English was also my native language, though, and I was born to white American parents who spoke English natively.
Maybe slightly related
