Why is your English so good?

This is really off topic, but just wanted the 'forum' to clarify for the sake of my mind which 'thinks alot'.....

MyCockpit has many international / worldwide nationalities.

The one thing that we all have in common in terms of 'posting to the forum' is....we all communicate in the English language!

There are lots of Dutch members here especially, as well as Spanish, German, Norway, and Greek members etc. All these members seem to speak and write perfect English!

How did you learn English so well, despite it not being your native language. Is it compulsory to learn the English language as an international or European citizen, and did you have to go out your way to learn it, or was it compulsory at school....

I really did wonder....totally off topic I know!

Alex

Que,..................?:p

in the netherlands everyone has english in highschool and even on some elementairy schools.

In Holland we get exposed to English from day 1 because our TV networks always broadcast the original language with added subtitles. I think this is rare, from what I see in Germany, France, Spain etcetera they have actors synchronising the dialogs in their own language. But I'm jealous of the nordic people, their own language is so close to English that it sounds perfect.

One thing to remember though, we're still notoriously straightforward. We don't hint and we dont understand hints. In other countries one would say for instance 'this plan might need a little improvement'. We just say 'it sucks' :-D which shocks the non-Dutch perhaps. So sometimes it's an advantage to speak clumsy English ;-).

As far as I can tell, everyone in NL speaks English so well that you can live there (in Amsterdam at least) and not have to learn Dutch. Whenever I go I feel really embarrassed that I basically have to make everyone speak English because I have zero Dutch. I like to be able to at least try to speak the language wherever I go. Anywhere that speaks French, German or Russian, I'm good. I deployed my pidgeon Spanish in Barcelona but everyone just started speaking English at me :-(

English is a hard language to learn, especially for non-Nordic or Northern European people - English is relatively closely related to Danish via Frisian, to Swedish and Norwegian thereafter, and of course to German and thus - via Low German - eventually to Dutch. But for a tone speaker from China, say, it must be a real nightmare. I tried to learn Cantonese once, and lets just say the concepts didn't sit easily.

But English is also one of the most agglutinative languages in the world - we just swallow up everyone else's vocabulary. Hence cafe, boulevard and avenue from French, zeitgeist from German, snooker from Hindi, and many many many more. Words you thought were old English staples turn out to be loanwords. Bungalow, dinghy, loot, mammoth, galore, phoney, not to mention ombudsman (I figured that was Latin but apparently it's Swedish. Who knew?).

If people the world over didn't learn English and then bring their own contributions, it wouldn't be half the language it is. So thanks, Anglophones of the world! It's your language as much as its ours, now.