I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.

Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.

edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.

  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Also Germany.
    I learned english in school but only enough to be able to read it.
    Once I started reading user submitted short stories (lile fan fics but different) my grammar really improved.
    Nowadays the content I consume is basically 90% english based.

    Just my capitalization and grammar structure sucks. Also my vocal skills as I have no one to talk to.

    But: I really have to thank my last Grundschul and Realschul english teachers. Without those two I may have never got into english that well.

    • SoGrumpy@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Without those two I may have never gotten into english that well.

      FTFY. Not a dig, just correcting your already very good English.

    • miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      For me it was mainly watching films and tv shows in english. I’ve always preferred the original audio on anything, really. So it motivated me a good bit to become more fluent.
      The only german dub I didn’t hate was Breaking Bads’, and even then I wasn’t overly fond of it.