Hi there 
I am really happy that I have found ling. It’s so much fun to learn with this program.
In the past I have seen so many videos about polyglots, like Tim Doner, Alex Rawlings, Richard Simcott, Luca and Steve Kaufmann of course. Steve’s youtube channel is amazing !
I learned to speak and understand English because I listened to audio-books, interviews, movies and Star Trek episodes for years. Interesting that I did that intuitiv.
Now I can listen and read on ling to learn Italian…a dream comes true 
Thank you Steve !!!
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Gee Alexandra, you have mad my day Good luck in your language learning. I am very happy to hear that I have had a positive influence on your learning. It is amazing how much we absorb of the language if we just allow ourselves to enjoy it. And Italian has so much to offer.
Hi Alexandra,
You really have made my day too. I am so pleased you are learning Italian through LingQ. I wish you lots of success.
I am a native English speaker. I have learned to speak Spanish by studying for three years at university. I have also studied applied linguistics where I became very interested in the idea of learning a language through listening and reading. I have been listening and reading German here on LingQ for just over three years. I can now understand native speaker podcasts if I understand the topic and the recordings are clear. I speak only a little German yet. I think that this is because I have been listening and reading very broadly and have not ‘studied’ the language much at all.
What interests me is that you learned to speak English as well as understand English by listening. How did you become good at speaking English?
Hallo Ginkgo58,
I think that I learned to speak too, because I always repeated some parts from the movies or interviews. Sometimes I spoke it out loud, another time I only thought the text. For example, I took my favorite scene from a “Star Trek - The next Generation” episode. Now I undertook the part of Captain Picard, I spoke his lines. That was so much fun. Or I was Captain Janeway from Voyager too.
When I watched interviews I copied the person, I spoke like her or him.
I memorised the interviews, because I listened them for month. Therefore it was easy to grab a character and said exactly the same.
18 month ago I started to talk to people from the USA and Great Britain. They were surprised that I speak English so well.
Thanks Alexandra.