The_Blog: That's true. But that is not really exclusive to european. He was wondering why especially europeans have decent english skills.
Tekkaman-James: While on the subject, I must say that I am impressed with the vast majority of the non-English members here who are able to speak such a convincing level of "conversational" English. Very VERY few here speak like a robotic translator. Is that just learned over years of chatting like we do here on the GOG forums? Or do they teach this kind of stuff?
Hah! What we learn in school has nearly nothing to do with english. School-english is some kind of idealized fantasy english of which the teachers believe to be english.
Much of my english I learned from computergames. Back in the eighties the games were not translated to german and you were lucky if a game had a german manual!
The more dirty parts of english I learned by listening to Rap groups like "Two Life Crew", "N.W.A.", "Ice-T" and so own. The older Rap musik -untill the middle of the 90s - were a good source for curse words, you just had to make sure you only bought CDs with the "Parental Advisory - Explicit Lyrics" sticker on them.
In the last few years I learned the more day-by-day conversational english buy reading and writing in some english forums. Oh, wait: This is one of these forums.
One problem I still have with english is the difference between these and those!