If you've a second language, how did you learn it?

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My second language is English and I learned it through internet/movies/videogames

My third language is Spanish and learned it by playing videogames either with Spanish subs or voiceover

My first language is French

I became moderately fluent in Spanish when I lived in Spain for a few months. The thing that stands out the most for me is how I exponentially improved after about 2 months. From day one of arriving there I took 4 hours of language class, 5 days a week. For the first two months my improvement in both speaking and understanding seemed extremely minimal... I was by far the one who struggled most in class, which I hadn't experienced for many many years as I always performed above average in school. I could barely get out more than a sentence for most of this time without getting stuck or not understanding something. I could tell I was unlike anyone the teachers had come across before, by the way they reacted to me and didn't know how to help me. However after about 2 months, I rapidly became able to speak most of the time in Spanish and by about 2.5 months I was speaking and understanding it more fluently than most the people in my class. By 3 months I felt extremely confident and had started pushing ahead of the class, working out the more advanced aspects in my own time. By this time I was speaking 100% in Spanish even with other English speakers, and was even able to get in a 30 minute long argument with a Spanish shop owner about a purchase I had made lol

So, to help understand how I learned it... I think before I could go along with the class in learning various useful phrases, verb conjugations etc, I had to sit back from everyone else and absorb the complete framework of the language, if that makes sense. I don't know how to put it into words very well as this is a visual thing for me, but I need to feel like I'm in a perspective that is 'distant' and 'external' to the language where I can see how 'big' it is and how far it's boundaries extend, along with how it functions internally, before I can make sense of the 'minor' details like conjugations. To use an analogy, it's like I need to be on a space station, looking down at Earth, the language. From that position I can see everything about Earth, and I don't feel overwhelmed by being so close to everything and surrounded by everything I'm trying to study. If I just jump straight into a completely new area of learning, without knowing anything about it, I feel sort of like I'm suffocating.

This learning style I have isn't limited to language either, it seems to apply to other new things I learn. However it's not like I would feel suffocated if I took a class in modern art history (something I know absolutely nothing about), because that still fits into broader categories which I'm familiar with - history, culture etc. Learning Spanish was different because it was something completely different cognitively, I think.

Sorry if this sounds like absolute nonsense, I'm new here and not even sure if I have an ASD

My first language is Finnish, the second is Swedish and English is only the third. I learned them the normal way, at school. I was lucky to have good teachers, but also lucky to grow in Finland where foreign movies and other TV shows are never dubbed into the native language, which is the custom in southern European countries. Instead, there's translation on bottom of the screen. It helps enormously in learning languages. I also know German and Russian.

In this thread somebody said above they mix languages freely and pick words from a variety of languages. I do this, too, to some extent even when I'm speaking Finnish with other Finns and there should be no reason for it. When I write almost anything for my own purposes, the resulting text is a mixture of Finnish, English, and Russian.

My first language is Brazilian Portuguese. I learned English by playing video games and looking the words up in an English-Portuguese dictionary I had. I started doing that when I was 7 years old, but since I only had a Sega Mega Drive back then (in Brazil, the Mega Drive/Genesis is still sold to this day; the cartridges are much more expensive than bootlegged CDs and DVDs from newer consoles), I only began to become fluent when I was 11 years old and got my PlayStation (whose bootlegged CDs were cheap enough for me to have more than 120 of them, eventually).

I'm the opposite: I find languages quite easy to pick up (and yes, I am autistic, and was verbally delayed--though I am fairly certain I UNDERSTOOD English long before I could speak it).

Anyway, English is my first language, but I am also fluent in French. I live in Canada, and that is our other official language, so during grades 7 through 12, I was put into French Immersion, where the majority of my classes were in French. I found it easy since that is all I heard all day at school.

I've also learned how to read/translate Biblical Hebrew, and by the end of April 2014, I need Greek, Latin, and German (because I'm doing a Masters degree in Theology). I am not worried about taking the languages. For me, languages are all rule-based, and I am very good and picking up and following rules. I can also see connections in related languages. For example, English is a Germanic language. The only word I currently know in German is "adieu", but if you put a German paper in front of me, I could translate quite a portion of it because of it's similarities to the English language. Same goes for Italian and Spanish since I know French. I can even pick up a few Arabic words now that I know some Hebrew. Learning the grammar rules can get really boring, but I would definitely say languages are a strength of mine.

Being an American, my native language is English. I began speaking very early (about 6 months of age) and I was reading by the time I was 1 1/2. My second language is Spanish which I began studying when I was 13. I learned it in a mixture of the traditional way (classes in school) as well as extensive independent study as I was dissatisfied with the slow pace of most of the classes I took. After 7 years of study, I can carry a very competent conversation but I must say that my receptive skills (reading and listening) as well as my Spanish writing, are still much better than my speaking. I still feel a bit afraid when I speak Spanish because I am so articulate and precise in English, but I know that my Spanish is still not at that level. It's sort of a bogged-down feeling and I really wish I knew how to erase the fear I still feel.


That aside, languages have become a love for me, and I've even partially constructed my own (if this sounds weird, don't worry, I don't use it with anybody, it's merely a mental exercise).

My first language is Hungarian and English is the second. I'm not good at learning languages. I learned in school, by using and programming computers, watching movies and TV shows (e.g. Star Trek DS9), and excessive reading. Participating on WP was a huge help too. Like some of the other posters, I can't pick it up easily just by hearing, need to see it written down and practice before I can understand spoken language. It seems that I'm somewhat slow at constructing and deciphering verbal structure.