Tell me about how you learned English!! I’m such a linguist and I’m learning Spanish right now and so I’m like. Hyper excited about all the language stuff. Like how, when, why :^)
Oh, good luck with learning Spanish!!! I can somewhat understand it on account that Portuguese is a very similar language (kind of the same level of similarity that German has to Dutch, if I had to guess) but actually speaking speaking it is a whole different thing, hehe.
Technically I started officially learning English when I was around 12 as a 2nd language in school. But I’ve had contact with the language since I was a little child because I loved playing computer games! CD-ROMs were a novelty back then and there weren’t a lot of Brazilian made ones, but to this day it isn’t very common for video games in general to get a Portuguese translation.
Personally speaking, immersing myself in the language that way, but also by learning song lyrics, watching cartoons and using the internet was what helped me the most with fluency, more than school did, if I’m being honest! Contact with native speakers in a casual context puts things in a whole new perspective.
I‘m still kinda self conscious about my accent, though, heh. I do way more reading and writing than speaking per se so sometimes I still stumble on certain words and phonemes. Hopefully I’ll get better on that in the future.
