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?

  • Humanius@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    7 hours ago

    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.

    • WaxRhetorical@lemmy.world
      3·
      7 hours ago

      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.

      • Humanius@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 hour ago

        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.