Youtube alone was at least 60% for me

School gave me a serious boost in grammar. It would have taken me ages otherwise. That said, the majority of my vocabulary is still from games. I might still not know how to call that rolling painting brush thing but I know at least 10 words for different kinds of swords. You can never know.

This makes me feel so fucking old lol.

None of the apps shown and only one of the companies behind them (Disney) even EXISTED yet back in 1980s Denmark where I started learning English by playing the family Commodore 64 😄

Book goes brrrrrrr

I learned English though movie piracy.

watching on tv or through legal means would be translated to my local language, but thanks to piracy, I got all my media in English and learned through it.

I didn't have streaming services when I grew up. I leaned from TV (in my country everything has subtitles, nothing is dubbed) and downloading movies at 20kb/s with Kazaa that didn't have subtitles. I had English, French and German in school for 13 years. I don't speak a word of French and German. The only French I know is "omelette du fromage" thanks to Dexter's laboratory, while I have French family. But since they are too proudly French that they refuse to speak English, that I will put zero effort into learning any French.

I would say it's 20% in school, 30% from gaming, 20% films and shows and 30% from arguing with people online.

My guides

I severely hope people don't learn English from c.ai now...

Learned it from PlayStation X games

Cartoon Network for me. And Linux manuals.

Colonization and Michael Jackson

Programming for me. Those textbooks are rarely translated well.

Video games 95% for me. Later it was sitcoms or other television series, and some film. Cartoons and donald duck comics were not in English.

I’m American and yeah definitely the “it spawned in my head.”

Also the same happens for other languages too, though I’m not around them enough to attach meaning to it. But I’ll dream different languages or hear Russian and French in my head sometimes and have no idea what it means.

What’s crazy is that everytime I’ve remembered and been able to type them out, they are legitimate phrases not just nonsense. I guess my mind just picks up phrases it hears and doesn’t attach the meaning to them fsr just repeats them.

I learnt it on my Reddit user era.

Hurts my heart but I learned English on reddit, I had good school English and had to learn words early for playing full English games but it's on reddit I learned how to speak it instead of just reading it without answering

Mostly my Mom reading me books and stuff before I entered kindergarten. All the more complicated grammar came from primary school and not wanting to look uneducated online oddly enough.

Ordering food at a restaurant.

There's also the .001% people like me and my dad that are hyperlexic and taught ourselves.

Is Podd a joke to you?

Tatsumoto has a pretty good guide on doing things the 'left' way. He and his community are pretty awful, but it's a nice resource on language acquisition nonetheless.

I'm learning Portuguese rn and the middle one is real

I learned how to type by playing GTA vice city with chest codes that I had to quickly type. No idea if it was possible to do that while the game was paused but it did teach me to stop typing with my right index.

Kids these days. When I was a kid we had to learn English from one of the 9 TV channels we picked up on the antenna and we hated it. If you don't hate your education you're so goddamn lucky.

I got my basics in school (grammatics, times, structure of sentences) and beginning of university. Sadly never understood articles. The rest is games and some series, then also reddit and youtube (and general internet troubleshooting for anything). Yeah.

Game forums (ye old Akamai games), game tutorials/guides, twitch?

I made up the English language

Yahoo chatrooms

A colleague of mine learned it from the hit '90s TV sitcom "Friends."

Memes