It varies a lot from person to person among those who are bilingual, and even from era to era. I’m Honduran, for context. I had nearly natively fluent English when I came out of high school and began working at a call center, mostly because I played an MMO for years and spent days and nights in Skype calls with groups of people from all over the world, most of which were native English speakers. Everyone else on the call center was astounded at how good my English was, and it was indeed miles better than anyone else in the office.

Then, I started university, it was predominantly taught in Spanish, everyone spoke Spanish, and I stopped playing MMOs and spending all day on Skype calls. I very clearly remember the transition, where I had trouble speaking Spanish quickly because I was so used to English, to now having to think for a second what I want to say in English before saying it in a less than perfect accent, while my Spanish now flows quite easily. My Spanish and my English essentially swapped places (to where they should’ve always been, if you ask me). I now believe this had a noticeable impact on my social life when I was young, I was too shy to talk in Spanish but the shyness would fade away completely if I held the conversation in English. Thankfully, spanglish became a predominant way of speaking now and everyone is happy lmao.

Content consumed did little difference, I believe. I never stopped consuming content in English. Still do, I spend too much time on Youtube and 99% of what I watch is in English, but my English will never be as good as it was back in those MMO days. Daily practice with native speakers makes all the difference in the world. I now have friends with better English than I had in my golden years, but since they work for Brits or Aussies, they have that accent, and I can’t tell the latino bits out of them at all, they could fool me if I didn’t know any better.

Edit: education here is not good. I had classmates on senior year who couldn’t read out of a reading book, at ALL. I’ve heard similar stories from even the most prestigious schools in the city. My school would pride itself on having some american teachers at some point, but that was history by the time I rolled through, so my English was 100% a gamer skill.

Pretty much equivalent, since I was in an English speaking country early enough.

Yes, I watch and read in original language. However you also need some cultural knowledge to get everything. While that seems obvious, the devil is in the details indeed.

I always have a lot of fun with words that split up into multiple in the other language. Recently I stumbled over kind(ness) which you’d split up in German: to act kind (freundlich) and to be kind (gütig) would be different words.

who’s

whose

how fluent

:-P

German here, usually fluent enough to understand movies and tv shows unless the characters have poor pronunciation or a heavy accent. Also old english Shakespearean fancy words sometimes give me trouble. I consume most media (YouTube, games, etc) in English.

Fluenty enough to know it isn’t who’s but whose. But not enough to properly understand a movie or a tv show. So the worst of both worlds.

Germany: I speak english better than many politicians. I am more than fluent i would say And yes ofc i undetstabd tv and movies lol

Portuguese. And it depends on the day.

I started picking up english even before being formally taught. I can easily follow a film, a podcast or some other media in full english with no need to dedicate the entirety of my attention to it. I can pick up humour and innuendo, along with cultural cues. Even some degree of lingo and slang.

Speaking can sometimes be challenging as I speak very fast in my native language and I tend to try to achieve to same in english, only to sound like a washing machine full of marbles on high speed.

When can I get a bit lost? Very dense accents, like scotish or some from the US. The Louisiana one throws me off completely. The australians are cool, except for their local wording that can be a bit harder to follow. Took me ages to figure what a sheila was and that calling someone a dingo was an insult.

And by the way: why can a kangoroo be a wallabee and just to rub salt on the wound most people will call it a 'roo?

Native English speaker, but I’ve visited India, so I have a different, related topic. Of course, there’s two caveats: I have an outsider’s perspective and the British have a very lengthy history with the region. In major cities, spoken English seems as popular as Hindi. In Delhi, signs seemed to be entirely in English, although maybe I just didn’t notice the Devanagari script as much because it’s incredibly foreign to me. Kolkata had less spoken English, but still more English signs than Hindi or Bengal (I can’t tell the difference). Traveling to rural West Bengal, the advertisements have skewed towards Bengali (I believe) and road signs are dual language, but but I don’t think I’ve seen a single business sign that didn’t have English as the primary text.

I thought it was silly that English and Chinese became the main languages in Firefly (which, for the show, was English with Chinese words thrown in). Now I realize, not only is that possible, but it’s already here. English is the global standard for air traffic control and imperialism has pushed language influence far and wide. International business has made English effectively a requirement for competitiveness. I was just oblivious as an English-only speaker at the time. I’ve wondered if Hindi would now be a more accurate 2nd language for the Firefly future, but I’m not convinced because of how prevalent English is there, like it might have already reduced the power of Hindi on the global scale. Plus, there’s so many dialects there, Hindi is the most common but it doesn’t have a majority

French, I watch and read almost nothing in French. I never use French dub.

Irish accent kicked my ass the couple times I went there. Scottish accent was tough too. I worked with people speaking with an Indian accent without much issues.

No issue in US, Canada, England.

I’m Dutch and I speak fluent English. Not because “all Dutch people speak good English” but because I have a Master’s in English language and I lived in the UK for 30 years.

My job is fixing terrible English written by Dutch people who think they speak good English (and that includes government ministers).

I’ve been consuming English media for many years. My computer and phone have used English since the 90s. I got used to it, so today, even if I could switch my phone to my native language, I don’t, it sounds strange.

These days I consume most media in English (US, UK, AU) - movies, tv shows, YouTube, websites, books (paper, audiobooks). I have no trouble understanding content, but I do keep subtitles on out of habit, and that helps when there’s a stronger accent.

I’ve been using English at work exclusively for more than 10 years, and where I live now, I hang out with an international crowd. We speak English to each other, even though it’s not anyone’s first language most of the time.

I take notes and journal in English, even privately. I sometimes even think in English.

I still have an accent and I’m missing some vocabulary and the occasional grammatical rule, but I consider myself fluent in English.

Written ? It’s actually better xD

Spoken ? Nah, we ain’t doing that

Answering your question: I think that I understand spoken English better than one of my mother tongues.

I’m pretty much a fluent English speaker. My native tongue is Dutch

There are certain sayings, phrases or slang that I may not be intimately familiar with. And sometimes I can’t think of a word that I really should have known and I need to look it up (but I get that in Dutch too)

But generally my thoughts are in English, when I speak English, which I think is a decently good sign of fluency.

Following movies is no problem, but I still prefer to have English subtitles under them in case I miss anything. Watching with subtitles is just something I’m used to anyway, because most movies in the NL are not dubbed, but rather the OG language (often English) with Dutch subtitles

I also speak a bit of French and German, but I’m nowhere near fluent in those.

I probably won’t pass as a native speaker because of the accent, but other than that it’s probably better than the average native speaker’s.

I do understand English very well, but still use subtitles in case the audio is muffled etc. When speaking I have a bit more trouble remembering certain terms and mangle grammar which i realize a second later. There are some terms or phrases that I haven’t encountered yet, had to have my american coworker explain some of those. In terms of being able to communicate it is totally fine but there is still friction that i feel coming from not only the language but our different backgrounds.

I also notice it is easy to learn a more niche word with the wrong pronunciation, or one that doesn’t fit with the rest of what we learned. We basically end up with a mix of british and american english with random accents.