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have you ever met anyone who spoke english better than their other language, even if living in a non English speaking country? (feddit.cl)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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i long-distance dated a girl when we were high school aged who lived in myanmar. (i sadly lost contact with her years ago when i made new social media accs)

she learned english as a little girl and only spoke burmese with her family and at school. however im assuming she didn’t read or write in it that much and most of the time, spoke to me and her online friends (which would be in english).

i remember google translating “hello, how are you?” or something like that and she told me to please not type in Burmese because she couldn’t read it without using Google translate to find out what i wrote in english.

while she can understand spoken burmese as well as speak it herself (she kinda has to living in myanmar), she can’t read it and told me she struggled in school for that reason.

naturally, she preferred english. i also know of people who speak 2 languages but either can’t read/write the one language and only speaks it or has trouble spelling words.

i think i knew a spanish speaker in the us who spelled words like “como te llamas” as “como te yamas” (not as a slang spelling, he was just trying to spell it)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

This is indeed common in countries that have been "westernized", in many cases people learn in English since very small age in school because people thought/think knowing English means better career prospects and prefer admitting people to schools that do all English. But in many cases they don't actually have native English speaking people to teach, so they just end up learning their own version of English, written English will be good, not spoken. And for their native language they'll know oral language but will be worse at written one. And people that studied in non-english schools will at least know their language better in written form, but depending on their career path (for example all higher level education in science is English) it might change.

And in many cases they have a native language that's not taught at school at all, and considering the past literacy rate, most of their parents don't know how to write in their own language at all. So they'll have to learn the most common language of the country and English (2nd and 3rd language), either type of school they goto, they'll never understand written form of their native language.