Let's be human for once! What's your first language? Sometimes I get tired to always write in a foreign language!

Im native Swedish. But spending all my time around english speaking people (my partner & boyfriend is British), I find that english is becoming more like my first language. Not that I speak it better, but I quite often find it easier to explain myself and my business in english.

Vietnamese’s here.

Xin chào.

Language is complicated.

My family is Welsh speaking but no one spoke Welsh to each other while we were growing up. So my mother tongue is really English.

I studied in French and German. And I could happily stop using English in favour of either of those.

I realised as an adult that if I didn’t pass Welsh on to my kids, the language would die out in my part of the family (my brothers can’t speak it at all). So I learned to speak it properly.

Now I live over half my life in Welsh (I also do a lot of work in the language these days) and speak only in Welsh to my daughter.

Just this week, I have used French and German in casual conversation with strangers either by email or at an appropriate distance while passing in the park on a walk.

Life would be so bland without different languages.

Bom dia! (just about the only bit of Portuguese I know, well, perhaps Ola.) Thanks for posting this. After living in France for two years, and as an ex-pat, trying to learn the language (which I've been trying to do for over half of my life as I have family who speaks French in Belgium), I have come to really appreciate the difficulty it is to be completely fluent in a second language. I'm American so my first language is English, and I feel that native English speakers got the luck of the draw in that we don't have to learn a second language. We should do better at learning a second language.

It took me some time before I was confident in French to speak it in a professional manner. Amongst friends or at the cafes I was fine as I didn't really care if I made a mistake. But I can relate to how tiring it is.

I would think most English speakers should ignore any mistakes you make even if you don't mention that English isn't your first language. I know that for me, I encourage anyone to speak a second language and have a lot of respect for those that do and do so confidently. And trust me, plenty of my fellow English speakers make just as many if not more mistakes in their native tongue than non-native English speakers. I've actually found that people who learn English as a second language tend to have better grammar than those that learn it from family. Those that learn it as their mother tongue tend to pick up all the bad habits of the poor grammar around them and do not study it in the same way someone formally learning it would.

Anyway, I'll leave you with maybe the second word I know in Portuguese, obrigado!

Sim, as vezes é cansativo. Nem sempre dá para se fazer entender, pelo menos não da maneira que gostaria que fosse.
Brazilian here!

Thanks for the shoutout 🤗

Yeah, I can only image how frustrating that must be. I'm sure that's terribly exhausting.

I am Polish. My girlfriend is French. We speak in English.

Italian! 🇮🇹 I’m at the point where I have no problem writing, reading or listening in English, because I basically do it all day, every day. But when it comes to speaking... 😱

Living and working as an expat for the last 6,5 years have definitely made some corrections in my communication patterns f.ex. I and my girlfriend switch speaking English and Latvian and mix it up all the time. We even had someone wondering why we're talking English with each other, while on the vacation in Turkey last year and we didn't even notice that.

Spanish here! I think I have "english lazyness" meaning sometimes I stop myself from engaging in a post because it is harder to explain my ideas and thoughts in english. Im trying to overcome this by practicing :)