
Growing up in post-communist Romania – thoughts on learning English - kioleanu
https://viorel.me/2019/thoughts-on-learning-english/
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paganel
Am Romanian who also caught the last years of the Ceausescu regime, can
confirm that I also learned English mostly by watching undubbed Cartoon
Network shows in the early ‘90s, my favorite was Top Cat (at least that’s how
I think it was called). I also learned Italian by watching Berlusconi’s
channels (“Non e la Rai” and “Mai dire goal” were among my favorite TV shows),
and my gf learned a pretty good Spanish by watching telenovelas while she was
a teenager. Living in a “small” culture kind of forces you to have to learn
new languages, otherwise you risk remaining stuck (both economically and
“culturally”, so to speak).

I’m still a little upset with myself that I wasn’t motivated enough to also
learn Russian when I was a kid (I had already learned how to read its
alphabet) and maybe also German. Now that I’m approaching my 40s this is
definitely on my to do list, I want to have the chance to read the works of
people like Heine or Pushkin in their original language.

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irrational
I was on vacation in Iceland. One evening we were having dinner in a tiny
village in northern Iceland. Our server was a young man with absolutely
perfect American English. I asked him if he had lived in America previously.
He responded that he had never left his village in his entire life, but had
learned all his English from watching American TV shows and movies. I was
astounded.

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simion314
In my village there was no cable TV at all for a long period of time after 89,
of course we had no internet and when we finally afford a cheap 486 PC(at that
time my friends had pentium 2s) me and my brother learn to use Windows95 in
English with no instructions.

Other memory from that period is trying to get larger files from my friends by
splitting them into smaller parts and put them on floppies , or when my mother
bought me a Norton Commander book and I learned a lot about low level stuff
and what does files in C:\ actually do.

About foreign languages similar as the author I learned English and I can
understand Spanish too, but also I can understand French and Italian movies
but maybe not as good, there were some good italian movies on national TV back
then too.

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warpech
Living in post-communist Poland, Cartoon Network via sattelite was exactly my
first exposure to English, too. The second exposure was video games.

I wonder how do people learn English in countries like Germany or Spain, where
all TV shows and games are fully localised.

Nowadays, in Poland these things are localised, too. I guess I will need to
hide that fact from my kids.

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klingonopera
Speaking for Germany, mostly from school. Germans are terrible at English
compared to many other European countries (especially the smaller ones) as
they're big enough to sustain their entertainment, Internet and business in
their local language.

Despite them being forced to learn English in school, very few will try to
consume American media in English, and still prefer consuming the locally
dubbed versions. In my opinion, it's the easiest (and most fun) way to get
better in English, without doing much at all, except for the initial year or
two one would need to invest to be proficient enough to consume said media.

Source: Am a German citizen, who fortunately/unfortunately has English as a
native language, spent my first 16 years in Asia, and presently another 13
years in Germany.

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amaccuish
Hmm. I'm gonna disagree here and say that the majority of Germans I've met
speak great English. I however will caveat this with the fact that I'm 22 and
it may be a generational thing. I am aware that if I go out into the sticks in
Germany, I will be 100% speaking German since it seems to me the more rural I
go the less English is spoken.

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klingonopera
People in rural areas, no matter which country, will almost always be worse
off in speaking a foreign language than their urban counterparts.

I agree it is a generational thing, and I believe this does have a lot to do
with the Internet and the "international culture" it promotes.

Have you compared some European countries in your age category? It's true that
22-year-old Germans speak English well, but a similarly aged person from
Romania, Poland, Denmark or Albania will almost certainly still be better at
English than the German.

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ed_balls
I've learnt basic english with computer games, pirated movies and TV shows
(with english subtitles). But to master the language you have to move to a
place where they use it. Otherwise, it is extremely hard hard.

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Mediterraneo10
> But to master the language you have to move to a place where they use it.
> Otherwise, it is extremely hard hard.

There are plenty of counterexamples to this. Consider Finland, where most of
the population is comfortable with English and admirably grammatically correct
(though they never really lose that distinctive Finnish accent), but they have
never lived in an English-speaking country, and in fact Finns travel in
general less than their Nordic neighbors. Learning English does not seem to
strike the Finns as “hard”, and if you ask them about the process you often
get the usual claim that English is an “easy language”.

Looking around European nations, the key to good English seems to be 1)
English in school taught from an early age and with a serious approach, and 2)
subtitles on television and films, never dubbing (or, as in the case of
Romania in the early millennium, a very active torrent community downloading
American releases).

~~~
type0
Yeah and not loosing the accent isn't that strange since Finnish is one of the
few non-indoeuropean languages in Europe and compared to English it's
definitely not an easy language to learn.

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lcall
I think esperanto is interesting, for reasons i wrote here (a simple site):
[http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854580627.html](http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854580627.html)

(things like: the cheapest way for the world to talk to each other, fun, not
replacing native languages, learn it in 1/4 the time of Spanish or 1/10 the
time of English, and probably learn it plus a subsequent language in less
total time spent, possible travel benefits with "pasporta servo" (free
lodging).)

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dep_b
I had a guy in our local IKEA (mainland Europe) explain to us that using a
certain combination of items for our closet doors would look "fugly", which
led me to believe he mainly learned English at internet forums full of trolls.

It was not that the combination wasn't fugly, he was right about it. But I was
somewhat surprised to hear that kind of language from a sales person.

Would there be 12yo kids somewhere out there in the world that can only
express themselves in 4chan English?

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proaralyst
Fugly isn't 4chan English, it's just slang. I grew up hearing people use it in
real life.

I'd be unsurprised to hear it in TV programming aimed at teenagers, so perhaps
he learned it from that

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baybal2
My father staunchly refused to buy a TV for the family, saying that there was
nothing besides garbage to watch, for what I am very grateful now.

Back then, I had no understanding why he does so, as he himself and
grandfather before him were making substantial money bringing TV sets from
Japan.

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thefounder
Where did he get the news from?

~~~
baybal2
We barely had any, life was very slow and uneventful

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damck
For me it was mostly video games. I have vivid memories of teachers' being
astounded by how much I already knew as far as elementary. Though it was funny
that I knew what "sword" is but other more common words eluded me.

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g_langenderfer
I made a mvp to practice a foreign language with subtitles. The spoken
language is how we all learned our primary language from our parents, so it
makes sense to start there as an adult.

You can check it out at caplearn.org, if you're interested.

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dotdi
I was born shortly before the Romanian revolution and I still learned English
by watching Cartoon Network. I never had to really study English since.

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Grue3
Growing up in post-communist Russia, I learned a lot of English by playing
videogames like Civilisation. All pirated, of course.

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gniv
That's an interesting anecdote. Growing up in communist Romania, the only
English I learned early on was at school. I had a great teacher in high school
(he would not utter a single word of Romanian), and then took elective classes
in college. When I came to the US the first time I could not really speak, but
I could understand well. It took 6 months of TV and social interaction (but
mostly TV...) to become fluent.

