I was born in Germany, but my father was a member of the US military, so I learned both English and German as a child, but am curious how those of you who grew up learning a language that is not English learned English.
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from my own point of view,not only experience is the best teacher but also exposure..we, africans, have been exposed to english speaking natives especially due to british colonisations dating back in the olden days..and there was no way we could communicate with them except through english..i truly believe that,us non english native speakers,speak the most fluent and perfect english only that we lack some proper accent..but we follow the grammar properly! Hope i have made a positive remark

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Thank you for the replies. It is interesting to see how global other countries. The US is certainly lacking in that regard.
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I agree :D

Marcab did a little generalization.

I am from India. I studied in State Government school and English was introduced at the age of 10 or in Grade 5. Every other paper was in regional language till Grade 10 or till I reached 15. So real English started at 15, no doubt this is case for most of folks who were born before 90s and were not living in cities.

But then worldwide exposure of Indian economy paved the way of social uplifting and English was the only way to the top. And gradually English flooded the countries of India and I was one of the beneficiaries.
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Thanks!

100% agree with you. Just would like to add something
Students were basically divided in two broad categories, Urban India and Rural India. In urban areas most of the student were used to go in CBSE or ICSE schools where English was the primary medium of learning. Surrounding culture was also giving these students great exposure to the English. The same scenario was in south India. Because of certain political issues, southern states refused to accept Hindi as second language and that place was filled up by english.
But, this was not the case in rest of the country. i remember, we first introduced with English in the 5th standard (in the age of 10th) and there too english was third language preceded by Mother-tongue(Marathi in my case) and Hindi. Even at the time of completion of our graduate degree we could only speak few english sentences.

The situation changed slowly after 1990 when Govt adopted a new liberal Economic policy and dramatically after 2000 with the IT revolution.
As our UID chief Sir Nandan Nilekani said in one of his speeches that now the English has become language of Aspiration and growth.
Now our state board (Maharashtra Board) as well made English as compulsory subject right from the 1st standard and this is happening across the whole country.

Narenn
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