Growing up in post-communist Romania – thoughts on learning English

Am Romanian who also caught the last years of the Ceausescu regime, can confirm that I also learned English mostly by watching undubbed Cartoon Network shows in the early ‘90s, my favorite was Top Cat (at least that’s how I think it was called). I also learned Italian by watching Berlusconi’s channels (“Non e la Rai” and “Mai dire goal” were among my favorite TV shows), and my gf learned a pretty good Spanish by watching telenovelas while she was a teenager. Living in a “small” culture kind of forces you to have to learn new languages, otherwise you risk remaining stuck (both economically and “culturally”, so to speak).

I’m still a little upset with myself that I wasn’t motivated enough to also learn Russian when I was a kid (I had already learned how to read its alphabet) and maybe also German. Now that I’m approaching my 40s this is definitely on my to do list, I want to have the chance to read the works of people like Heine or Pushkin in their original language.

I was on vacation in Iceland. One evening we were having dinner in a tiny village in northern Iceland. Our server was a young man with absolutely perfect American English. I asked him if he had lived in America previously. He responded that he had never left his village in his entire life, but had learned all his English from watching American TV shows and movies. I was astounded.

In my village there was no cable TV at all for a long period of time after 89, of course we had no internet and when we finally afford a cheap 486 PC(at that time my friends had pentium 2s) me and my brother learn to use Windows95 in English with no instructions.

Other memory from that period is trying to get larger files from my friends by splitting them into smaller parts and put them on floppies , or when my mother bought me a Norton Commander book and I learned a lot about low level stuff and what does files in C:\ actually do.

About foreign languages similar as the author I learned English and I can understand Spanish too, but also I can understand French and Italian movies but maybe not as good, there were some good italian movies on national TV back then too.

Living in post-communist Poland, Cartoon Network via sattelite was exactly my first exposure to English, too. The second exposure was video games.

I wonder how do people learn English in countries like Germany or Spain, where all TV shows and games are fully localised.

Nowadays, in Poland these things are localised, too. I guess I will need to hide that fact from my kids.

I've learnt basic english with computer games, pirated movies and TV shows (with english subtitles). But to master the language you have to move to a place where they use it. Otherwise, it is extremely hard hard.

I think esperanto is interesting, for reasons i wrote here (a simple site): http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854580627.html

(things like: the cheapest way for the world to talk to each other, fun, not replacing native languages, learn it in 1/4 the time of Spanish or 1/10 the time of English, and probably learn it plus a subsequent language in less total time spent, possible travel benefits with "pasporta servo" (free lodging).)

I had a guy in our local IKEA (mainland Europe) explain to us that using a certain combination of items for our closet doors would look "fugly", which led me to believe he mainly learned English at internet forums full of trolls.

It was not that the combination wasn't fugly, he was right about it. But I was somewhat surprised to hear that kind of language from a sales person.

Would there be 12yo kids somewhere out there in the world that can only express themselves in 4chan English?

My father staunchly refused to buy a TV for the family, saying that there was nothing besides garbage to watch, for what I am very grateful now.

Back then, I had no understanding why he does so, as he himself and grandfather before him were making substantial money bringing TV sets from Japan.

For me it was mostly video games. I have vivid memories of teachers' being astounded by how much I already knew as far as elementary. Though it was funny that I knew what "sword" is but other more common words eluded me.

I made a mvp to practice a foreign language with subtitles. The spoken language is how we all learned our primary language from our parents, so it makes sense to start there as an adult.

You can check it out at caplearn.org, if you're interested.

I was born shortly before the Romanian revolution and I still learned English by watching Cartoon Network. I never had to really study English since.

Growing up in post-communist Russia, I learned a lot of English by playing videogames like Civilisation. All pirated, of course.

That's an interesting anecdote. Growing up in communist Romania, the only English I learned early on was at school. I had a great teacher in high school (he would not utter a single word of Romanian), and then took elective classes in college. When I came to the US the first time I could not really speak, but I could understand well. It took 6 months of TV and social interaction (but mostly TV...) to become fluent.