Posted: Dec 12, 2011 1:57 pm
I'm With Stupid wrote:1. At what age did you start to learn English?
About the time I started going to school, should be around the age 3-4 yrs.
2. What was the English teaching in your public education system like:
a) In which country?
b) At what age did you start learning?
c) Did your teacher speak your native language during lessons? If so, what for, and do you think it was beneficial?
d) How much spoken communication in English did you do during these lessons?
a) India
b) 3-4 years. Formal English classes continued till the end of high-school, i.e. till when I was around 17.
c) Most of the teachers did. A few didn't. Usually, it was to explain stuff (sometimes the rules of grammar, meanings of words, phrases, sentences etc.) which we had difficulty understanding in English. I think it was mostly beneficial.
d) Like I said, most of the teachers only communicated in English during the formal, technical part of the lessons. So, in a class of 40 minutes, I'd say, we used to have about 25 minutes of spoken communication in English. The rest was in the native language. However, a few teachers insisted that we spoke in English throughout the class.
3. Did you supplement this with private tuition/study in a private language centre? If so, same a) b) c) & d) questions again.
I never did.
4. Did you ever live abroad in a situation that required you to use English regularly?
No.
5. Other than living abroad, how often did you get to communicate in English? And what form did these communications take?
Quite a lot. Communication with my friends from the other states of India is usually in English so is the communication with friends living outside India. Almost the whole of online communication is in English. So, I need to use English quite a lot these days, in spoken as well as written forms.
6. How often did you consume English-language media, and did you do so with a conscious effort to study/understand it?
It started with Hollywood movies and English newspapers/magazines and then came the music, books, and the rest. I usually tried to make a conscious effort to understand what was being said.
I know by definition, I'm only going to get answers from people that had a fairly successful experience learning English, but I'm more interested in what works anyway.
Bleh. I hate my Inglish.
