This blogpost is about oral not writing proficiency, and an informal comparison with English speakers from Asia.

95% of those peers who are born in SEAsia, India or other Asia countries … do not speak better than I do, perhaps better in some aspects, but no better overall.

Their accent is comparable to (if not stronger than) mine, as judged by Americans. Accent is probably the most important element in most situations, but purists would say vocab is more fundamental.

Their vocab is seldom richer than mine (even if they were taught English from birth), as I have steadily increased my vocab (primarily in writing but also speaking). Around 2018, I noticed that my oral vocab has reached a similar standard as many Singapore hotline staff.

Due to aging, our memory and therefore our vocab could decline, across your oral languages. It’s good to push ourselves to use a wider, updated vocab, perhaps with younger people.

Beside 1) vocab and 2) accent, I guess my next big improvement is 3) slower articulation. This feature is typical of fluent and confident speakers, not so common among non-native speakers (后来学英语的人).

I wanted to but couldn’t say the same about the Europeans (as I said about Asians). They may have a better learning environment and they probably start learning English earlier. I think majority of Western Europeans do not write (and read) English everyday as much as SGrns do. Presumably, their vocab is less /developed/.

Basically, only those growing up in the 5 native speaking nations speak more fluent English than I do.

— 2024 sugg: self-record in phones every month
My Aug 2024 Genepai presentation revealed that I can learn a lot (and gain motivation) about my /articulation/. It is relatively easy to self-record, as part of blogg

— exceptions .. are important to study, and is a /cornerstone/ (reference point) of this blogpost on my oral_English_proficiency

There are always talented individuals. Some of them learn English only in their teenage but learn it very well, such as my sister. Among the China students in NUS/NTU, some girls (and a few guys) are pretty good. Ignoring the fact that my interaction with them was rather brief, I would say that this small subset have high motivation, strong talent, and probably become more fluent than me, in oral and writing.

This exceptional subset tend to gravitate towards non-technical professions. There are too many such professions, so I would not name them.

Some Malaysians and some SGrns (including our 3 prime ministers) actually grow up speaking English as their first langauge. Many but not all of them have good vocab, and light accent. They tend to speak better than I do. Remember Caroline of PropNex?