My wife is from a non English speaking country and her English is better then my Australian English.

Written ? It’s actually better xD

Spoken ? Nah, we ain’t doing that

Not European, although I live and work in Europe so the official language at my company is English, so I can give some extra insight there.

English is my third language, I learned it in part because the school teaches it (albeit very badly), but mostly because games and movies weren’t translated back then, especially those a young teen without money but with internet access could have access to. I watch English content regularly (in fact I think 90% of the movies and TV shows I watch are in English). I do watch them with subtitles (in English), but that’s because I sometimes have trouble hearing things (I also watch content in my native language subtitled when possible).

I communicate daily in English with my coworkers, some of who also have English as the second language. We’ve had some minor misunderstandings because of things that sound a certain way in one language, e.g. I came out harsh on one discussion because I said something I can’t remember now, luckily my manager is also a native Spanish speaker and explained what I meant when the other person responded harshly. Speaking of my manager, we usually talk in Spanish, but sometimes you get a technical term or something you’re so used to say in English that you just switch and start talking English, until randomly you switch back, so on and so forth. I think someone would have to be fluent in both languages to follow our conversations.

I speak, write and understand English as if it were my native tongue, but I was married to an English-speaking woman for many years and spoke exclusively with her in English for over 12 years. And I’m really drawn towards language/math/music/programming, etc., so I don’t think I’m very representative.

But my country is well educated in English. In fact, some parts of the country seem to be forgetting their native language because of all the goddamn foreign (American) influence in popular and global culture.

Very annoying if you ask me. Just, anglicisms everywhere, shit that doesn’t sound idiomatic to our language at all. Expressions that sound like they were run through Google Translate when it first came out in 2006, basically a word-for-word, 1:1 translation. Sounds stupid af.

Anyway, /rant.

I’d say I understand most, except maybe some specific terminology that is less common. And things like sayings might sometimes throw me off-guard because while I can translate them, I can not always figure out what they mean. Accents and dialects can be tricky sometimes, just like when the speech is a bit faster than I’m used to. But overall I’d say I’m fine. I’m also lazy though, so I just read the subtitles whenever I can 🙂

Small note though: my high school offered bilingual education, so about half of the subjects was given in English by native speakers and I did IB English exams, that helped a lot and I’m certain my English level is well above average because of that

I’d say I’m quite fluent, however since I mostly learned from computer related internet forums my vocabulary is quite limited.

It’s pretty good. I normally consume all english content in its original language.

Like nearly as fluent except when I get lazy and stop thinking of “fancy” words to write. English has a lot of fancy words: vocabulary synonymous to other elements of the lexicon. I don’t know those types of words in Portuguese lol.

I can understand movies fine but prefer captions regardless of the language being spoken unless I am in a very quiet room.

I’m brazilian and my family thinks I am really smart for knowing another language but really I just watched YouTube when i was a kid so uh yeah I’m not sure how fluent I actually am since I’ve only met other second language speakers.

I’d say I’m at a very fluent level when it comes to understanding and writing. Most of my media consumption is in English and I can understand it just as well as German. I even think in English sometimes.

Speaking is a slightly different story though. I can still communicate just fine, but my English becomes much less eloquent compared to my writing. I just don’t get to practice it very often and even when I do, it’s usually talking to other non-native speakers, so we’ll both be talking at a relatively basic level.

I am able to follow an American movie by just listening to it, but if I do turn on the subtitles, I get a lot more out of it! I need to spend less of my brain capacity interpreting the foreign language and can use more of it for understanding the social context shown in the film. Or the scenery. I understand more meanings and can read better between the lines when I can see a decent translation into my mother tongue in the subtitles.

But also: Netflix and one of the Finnish TV stations save extremely much in their translations. That means the translations often contain gross errors or leave things outright untranslated. Even then the subtitles often help, because if my understanding of what was said and what I can read in the translation are about the same, then everything is probably fine.

In any case: My English is not all that bad, as you can see, but I still turn the subtitles on whenever I can, and I am much less interested in watching a foreign film without them.

I am largely unable to enjoy song’s lyrics in English if I cannot read them at the same time. In song lyrics the difference is much more noticeable than in movies. I can get about 75 % of the enjoyment of a movie even without subtitles, but lyrics in songs almost become just another musical instrument if I cannot have the lyrics in text format to follow while listening to a song in a foreign language.

Also, if I try to write something beautiful, it is usually best that I write it in Finnish and then translate it into English, because I can express myself so very much better in Finnish than in English! Takes more than twice the time compared to just outright writing the text in English, but the plot of a story becomes much better if I’ve written it down in my mother tongue. There will be more nuances in the people’s behaviour, and that translates into a more interesting text overall. Even after translation.

I can sometimes come across as a native speaker. The accent goes all over the place, australian, south african, brittish.

I do understand English very well, but still use subtitles in case the audio is muffled etc. When speaking I have a bit more trouble remembering certain terms and mangle grammar which i realize a second later. There are some terms or phrases that I haven’t encountered yet, had to have my american coworker explain some of those. In terms of being able to communicate it is totally fine but there is still friction that i feel coming from not only the language but our different backgrounds.

I also notice it is easy to learn a more niche word with the wrong pronunciation, or one that doesn’t fit with the rest of what we learned. We basically end up with a mix of british and american english with random accents.

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.

I can communicate with native English speakers very well. I have difficulties following an English-spoken movie or series tho.