>>17299441>honestly its pretty easy for esls to learn english these daysSo easy that they do it without noticing. Not I nor any ESL I know picked up English cause they really were interested in learning it, just that they consumed a lot of shit on the internet until they inevitably did.
This next generation is going to be even worse. They already get an IPad shoved down their throats the second they can hold one. It's scary to think you'll probably be interacting with them in a decade or so.
>you dont have to know any of the technical minutia to be good at englishI guess? I kind of feel that it takes more than just being able to string coherent sentences to consider yourself actually good with a language. Especially when it comes to one that's as simple to speak as English is. It comes off to me like saying that you're good at walking. Maybe communicating with it well and actually being good at it are two different things.
If you had a clear grasp of the mechanics and whatnot of the language alongside speaking it well, to me that just sounds more deserving of being called good. Just because it's less common, I guess?
And, sure, other people can still perceive you as good, but that's probably because it's really easy to make yourself sound smart with English. I guess that's one of the things that come with it being very widespread. Doesn't really change how you know yourself, right?
It also feels big-headed whenever I think of saying that I'm good at anything. I always need to find a way to downplay it. That's probably just me. Am I applying it here? Maybe.
Honestly, it's likely just each person's definition of "good" that makes it, so it's whatever.
Either way, I still sort of suck. There's entire paragraphs that I just can't understand sometimes when reading books because too many of the words fly over my head, and I have to look up what a word means more often than I care to guess.
Which is fine. Just improving is fun, although I don't actively care to.
