Posted: Jan 09, 2012 7:57 pm
I'm With Stupid wrote:1. At what age did you start to learn English?
If I remember correctly, I was 9 years old when we were first taught English in school. However, even back then (which, for me, is now 25 years ago) Dutch tv broadcast lots of English spoken tv programs. These programs are almost always subtitled instead of dubbed, so children are confronted with the English language from a very early age.
2. What was the English teaching in your public education system like:
a) In which country?
The Netherlands.
b) At what age did you start learning?
As I stated earlier, in school at around 9 years old.
c) Did your teacher speak your native language during lessons? If so, what for, and do you think it was beneficial?
I can't really remember. I think explanation about grammar and such was in Dutch, but if I recall correctly the lessons were largely in English.
d) How much spoken communication in English did you do during these lessons?
We did a fair bit of conversation exercises, can't remember how much exactly.
3. Did you supplement this with private tuition/study in a private language centre? If so, same a) b) c) & d) questions again.
No.
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?
About ten years ago, I had a job at a money exchange/transfer office, where lots of customers were from another country (Surinam, Dutch Antilles, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Nigeria, Brazil...from practically everywhere, really). Most of them communicated in English. After that job, I haven't really had any chance to practice my verbal English skills, so I think they might be a bit rusty. I've frequented English-language forums and media a lot in the past ten years though, and I think it's helped maintaining my knowledge.
6. How often did you consume English-language media, and did you do so with a conscious effort to study/understand it?
Tv and internet, practically every day. It's never really been a conscious effort, it's just that when you read and hear the language that often, it's not difficult to speak or write it any more. I love reading fantasy books (Steven Erikson, R. Scott Bakker especially) and I always read them in English, mostly because I think so much of the atmosphere gets lots when it's translated in Dutch. I especially hate it when character names are translated, because then they always sound so uncool. From reading expat blogs I've learned that Dutch is not exactly considered a 'sexy' language abroad.
I still use online dictionaries regularly if I don't know the meaning of a certain word, though, mostly when it comes to technical terms. The last word I needed to look up was 'sophistry'.
