Nicolas, how did you learn English.
You are a French citizen, right?
Or are there many people that speak English in France as there second language.
I am just curious.
I began with english with my first videogames, that were almost never translated by then. I used to hassle my father with that. With time, I understood more words. Then I learned it at school. Then came Internet and the discussion forum that really boosted my written abilities. Now, beware, I can write and understand spoken english in most situations, but the way I speak, like most french people, is terrible.
I learned german at school (it was my #1 language, english was only my #2, because an old habit said that best pupils were supposed to do that way), I can understand written german rather well, as long as there are not too much technical words. I never really got the grammar, though, so my writing is poor. I can understand spoken german, but I'm not able to speak it beyond very basic sentences.
Recently I tried myself at russian, at the University, it was pretty tough ! That language has an incredible number of rules and exceptions to learn. I'll try to continue next year, if I get enough time. The public education system definitively helps there.
Also, I learned latin a bit at school, but in a very similar way to german, I had problems with the grammar. Though latin is even more unforgiving for that.
I'm certainly not bilingual or even less trilingual. A true multi-lingual person can express his/her thoughts regardless of the tongue. I knew a girl that was like that with german and french. BTW she was born in Berlin, and had a Turkish-German father and a French mother. Multi-lingual persons have almost always parents of different nationalities, or lived as kids in a foreign country, in my personal experience.
---------- Post added at 10:18 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:15 PM ----------
Not so much I'm afraid. But hopefully it's getting better with the young generations.
I think it is. My youngest sister speaks english much better than anyone in the family. She had the luck to have serious english lessons given by students of english/US/australian etc... nationalities at primary school, and this definitively had an impact. Also, she is from the "Internet generation", so I think she always had to deal with english. I'm 30, and when I was a young kid, you still could live without knowing a word of english. Things were very different, and Internet was a true revolution there.
