What is it like to speak English fluently as your second language?

it feels normal to me..so normal that it frustrates me to have to deal with people that can't speak or write proper English.(edit:this does not mean people from all over the world who have a hard time. They're Interesting because I tend to use technical terms when speaking and I have to make an effort to come up with a simpler way of speaking, without being obnoxious. Rather, this means the people who choose to use English as a way of coming across cool, without having a basic grasp, or people in management, who have to deal with English customers but don't seem to respect them enough to learn the language proper) my native language is dutch, i sometimes dream in English.Language doesn't have any influence on how i feel, although it's "easier"to hide in English. The amount of time i speak English depends on where and how.MyEnglish is good, so i often end up in English speaking countries, and i have a few friends who are either native speakers, or just like me have an easier time expressing themselves. And honestly, no i dont

English was the second language I attained fluency in, after Danish. I began reading in English already when I was 11, which made for my early fluency. I guess my early interest in the English language came from the fact that I found Danish quite a tedious language to speak and also write in. Even today I still have to think too much about grammar in my native language, which makes for some social awkwardness since I sometimes stall mid-sentence. These circumstances of course made me divert more and more from my native language, but even then I still get compliments from my Danish teacher for my use of some words he have not heard from a young person for a long time. I do what I can to preserve my proficiency in Danish, and also look to expand my vocabulary further in both of my fluent languages. With that said, I would say I speak and think about 80% in Danish, while I work a lot more in English. However, that is probably due to the fact that there are so few Danish speakers in the world, and therefore a much more limited amount of text available in Danish. One very good example for this, is that most education in the field of IT is not even available in Danish. You have to take most classes in English if you are going to study pretty much anything IT-related here. I still feel I have a lot to learn in both languages, though. An extensive vocabulary  in use can be one of the most beautiful things to read or listen to.

My parents are Tamil, I was born in Bangalore (Kannada speaking state) and I studied in an English medium school where we were forbidden to speak in anything but English. I also lived a number of years in a Hindi speaking region of India. As a result, the language I am most fluent in is English. I cannot read write or speak any other language with as much fluency. Other languages are only used by me when speaking to non English-speakers and I have to struggle for words. Of course, a fact remains that I mispronounce a lot of words, simply because I read them long before I used them - I always thought "banal" is pronounced "Bay-null" and that "monochrome" is pronounced "moe-no-chrome" - After I learned that "granite" is not "gra-night" but "grann-it" I started pronouncing "fragile" as "fra-jill" which is apparently wrong. I don't bother anymore to correct pronunciation, because I distinctly heard Dustin Hoffman pronounce Celtic as "Sell-tic"  and not "Kell-tic" I once read an article which told of how the Queen herself said that English was no longer the property of the British, and that the western world should be more accepting of different modulations of pronunciation and local idioms of English from the world over. As long as it's the written word, I think I am as good or much better than the average westerner in terms of vocabulary and composition. As for thinking, again I am only conditioned to think in English. But it helps a lot knowing other languages, there is a wider range of thought processes possible when you are somewhat of a linguist, especially if the languages you know are very unrelated.

I won't remember your list of questions, alas, and it's a tad clumsy moving back and forth on the Quora-app on the iPhone but let's hope I get most of it down. I guess I can say I'm quite fluent in English. I make mistakes but who doesn't, especially native speakers? I've been correcting a few, just for the fun of it, though, since I hate being a grammar-nazi:)Anyways, I'm born in Norway and in my days we started learning English at the age of eleven. I don't know why really, but I picked it up quite easily. After a year my schoolmates asked me for help if some tourists stopped asking for directions or something. This being long before Internet and in the edge of civilisation way up north in Norway, we didn't even have telly and cinema was a rare thing so it's not like today when kids are submerged in English. I barely heard it but I still knew about the different dialects and/or accents - very broadly, though - like the cockney cutting out their aitches and the Scottish rrrrolling their rs. Not that I could imitate it, but still, I think I was the only one around knowing such stuff. But it was all oral for me. I didn't feel confident enough reading much aside from the textbooks we had and the occasional article now and then. I was way up in my twenties before I read an entire book in English, in spite of the fact that I've been writing a lot before that, letters and such. So, how about my accent? Well, I use to say that I'm a parrot. It all depends who I'm talking to. Or who is talking to me. Once I met this Irish bloke in the wee hours in Helsinki, both looking for a place to quench our thirst. He didn't speak anything but English and after a while he said a little irritated that I didn't have to try to sound like an Irish. I told him that I wasn't trying to. I was just mirroring him. We ended up in some dingy place in the suburbs drinking moonshine and when we called it a day, he said: I have to admit that you sound quite convincing.But the best compliment to my English I got from a woman in a pub up in Norwich when I visited a friend of mine there a few years ago. We were chatting along a bunch of her friends and I, when one of the ladies in the company asked me: "So, what brought you back to England then?"She got a little put off almost when I told her that I wasn't English at all. People have asked me if I've lived there but I have only visited briefly a few times. Never have I had any girlfriend from the UK. I almost had one and she told me that she often forgot I wasn't British when I asked her to explain phrases she used, being from London as she is. But not common. Oh no. Although she is but she doesn't want to sound common. And she doesn't. I'd say my natural accent is a bit northern woiking class, Manchester perhaps, mixed with a touch of Irish. But I can stiffen up my upper lip if need be and sound BBC-posh:) And I can imitate some kinda southern drawl, too. Amurcan. But that would clearly be imitation. But again, it depends on who I'm talking to and who's talking to me. I find writing in English to be quite natural to me and I like playing with different styles. Somehow I find that I express myself differently when I write in English than when I write in Norwegian. It's easier to fall into the absurd and play with words and so on. Puns intended, like. How much do I use English then, daily? Aside from writing comments here, not that much, actually. I live in Portugal and Portuguese is the language I wake up with, having Portuguese words rolling off my tongue before my brain has cranked up. I think I have dreamt in Portuguese as well. I'm sure I would have dreamt in English if I had moved there. As it is now, it's just that language I have ready in the back of my brain and which I happen to be quite fluent in, for some quirky, inexplicable reason. If it has influenced my native tongue? Not that much, really. Not as much as I notice it has when I visit Norway these days. Anglicisms or whatever the term is, are sneaking into the language more than ever and it doesn't seem like people are aware of it, even. In my case I think Swedish has influenced my Norwegian more. Or just the fact that I left my own dialectal area when quite young and then having moved a lot and lived in various countries. So, more or less like that. And how does it feel? Natural in one way but odd in another. The latter since I've never studied English aside from the six years I had it at school and neither have I lived in the UK or the USA or down under. My sister does, by the way. I had an Irish flat mate in Sweden a couple of years abd we fell back into English although he spoke Swedish, too, but as he said, it was easier speaking English with me - and besides, I knew more three-syllable words than he did. Poor lad from Ballyfermont as he is, brought up in a pub. And no, I didn't get my Irish accent from him. He lost his as he left Ireland when he was seventeen.OK. Enough. Been too much already. Hope I didn't bore anyone to death. :)

Well, the truth is that i don't fully understand why you are so surprised, since English is such an easy language. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns have no declensions and verbs almost have no conjugations (and they also have a small number of tenses). Plus you don't really need a big english vocabulary for the everyday life. So, it's not very impressive if a non-native speaker learns english fluently. Learning German, Chinese, Arabic, any neolatin language, Russian ... with fluency is way more remarkable. English is not a big deal

Personally I don't remember dreaming in a specific language. I very rarely remember dreams at all, so really I can't say. The language I use predominantly varies... at home I use Slovak exclusively (interpersonal, I still use internet and such in English), when I studied in Prague I obviously used Czech a lot, at work I use mostly English, but occasionaly German is prevalent, depending on what I work on and who I work on it with. Regarding to "feeling like myself", I don't make distinctions between English, Slovak, or, in past, Czech. German is a bit different, as I speak it well, perhaps just enough to say "fluent", but it is nowhere near on par with the other languages. Also personally I don't feel like I lost anything by being multilingual - rather another way round. When I was really little, like up to 3-4 years of age, I was truly, natively bilingual - but I have lost my command of Hungarian since, and I feel occasionally like part of me is missing.

My native language is Turkish. I have never lived in an English speaking country. I think it'd be fair to say that I started to learn English when I was a baby. My family was often listening to some songs in English and my older brother--who was already fluent in English--would teach me some words and simple phrases. Though I didn't get flawless until I was 18. (Then again, I have a writing disorder so I always make some mistakes when I write in English. Or in my native language.) I feel like myself when I speak English as much as I do when I speak Turkish, as my English vocabulary is large enough to express myself in the way I wish. I dream and think in English quite frequently. I'm bilingual and dream in every language I know. I use English every day. I read newspapers, magazines, books, websites, tweets in English, I tweet and post stuff on Facebook in English, I watch TV shows and movies in English (without subtitles), I speak to some of my friends in English. For the last 7-8 years some days I use English more than I use Turkish actually. Nope, my culture doesn't lose anything. It's not like I dumped Turkish when I learned English. I still use them both and will do so for the rest of my life. The only problem I have which is not really a problem but rather the reason of some funny memories is that I seem to can't get rid of my foreign accent completely. Every now and then I have to spell some difficult-to-pronounce words in order to be understood. On the bright side, I now have mad spelling skills.

What's it like? I'd say, pretty natural.My native language is Romanian. I was born and raised in Romania and have only left it to go on vacation abroad, not more than a couple of weeks at a time, but I've still been usually mistaken for an English native speaker (I remember this really odd moment when I had to show my passport to someone who kept making fun of me, saying I was Canadian after I said I wasn't American). I started learning English around 3 or 4 thanks to cartoons which weren't yet dubbed, then studied it in school (which didn't help much).I don't remember dreaming in any other languages but my native one.I only feel more like "myself" when I speak Romanian because of sarcasm. Don't get me wrong, I can use that with any of the languages I speak (in case that sounded arrogant, it wasn't my intention), but I'm more comfortable with Romanian because of the people that I engage in conversation with. I've found sarcasm to be something I can only afford to use according to the degree of closeness there is between me and another person, and the ones who are closest to me happen to be Romanians or foreigners who were raised (sometimes born as well) here, thus qualify as native speakers.Now, speaking: roughly 90% of the time Romanian, 5% English and 5% other languages. Working/studying: 80% Romanian, 15% English, 5% others. Thinking: same as speaking (I don't really make an effort to translate things in my head before speaking or writing).That being said, I don't feel like I'm losing anything as long as I can fully express in Romanian everything I know in a foreign language. If we're talking about a certain category that borrows any possible word from any possible source, it wasn't a problem of keeping anything to begin with, so it's all good.

My native language is Spanish. I do dream in English every once in a while. I don't think I've had a dream in Spanish in a while. I think I feel myself in both languages, but it depends on what I'm doing. I know, it's weird! Let me explain myself. I've been working at Best Buy for a year, and I speak English at work all day, so most things I've learned to do at work like talking to customers about wireless plans or services that we offer, I've learned them all in English. So every time a Spanish speaking customer comes in and I have to explain all these things to them in Spanish it feels weird to me, I don't feel myself when speaking Spanish to customer at work, sometimes I even have to pause and think how I would explain something to my customers in my native language, weird eh?. I moved to the USA 3 years ago and I live in a small town in Georgia, where is very hard to find Spanish speaking people. In my every day I think I speak a 90% English, I speak English at home since my wife is an English native speaker and also at work. I speak a 10% Spanish because I always try to call my family back home so I'm forced to speak Spanish, but I think sometimes I even go for days without speaking any Spanish at all. I don't feel like I'm less me now that I speak English. I do have to admit that it took me a while to feel like I belonged here! learning the language wasn't easy. I remember having awful headaches after listening to people speak English all day, and some days I would wake up having trouble understanding people. I still struggle and my English isn't perfect, but I like that it is now part of my life :) I'm learning French now! We'll see what's gonna happen now ;)