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?
I personally found that I never learned English in school. The first few years I was really bad at it, but as soon as I started consuming English media in all forms - TV shows, movies, games, literature and yes, even (or especially?) forum posts - I started getting top marks, but simultaneously got very bored, because I felt like I didn't learn anything.
I had similar experiences in French and Italian - the difference being that I never consumed any media in those languages, so I still can't speak 'em.
But all of this let me to the conclusion that you can't learn a language "academically". Knowing the grammar is usually completely fucking useless, and it also won't help you communicate and understand. because you approach the language like math. Everything becomes a problem, that needs to be solved:
"Okay, here we have a verb that has this tense, so that means that blablabla."
I just don't think you can learn a language in that way.