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I was born in Bosnia and grew up in Bosnia but the thing is that ever since my birth, my mom (who is NOT a native English speaker) has been speaking English to me.

Another thing is that half of my family lives in the USA and just because of that we use English 60% of the time.

I met my first English speaking friends when I was 3-4 years old, we kind of grew up together and when we grew old enough to discover Skype and other apps, we continued communicating through them all. My best friend is from Cuba, living in Miami, and other people I spend time with every day are not from Bosnia and they don't live here either, which means I've been using and listening to English 90% of the time.

I started teaching English when I was 15 and established my own online English school last year.

Even though I am a Bosnian who lives in Bosnia, I cannot speak Bosnian well at all. I always need people to translate words from Bosnian into English for me and from English into Bosnian when I'm trying to speak.

Now what bothers me is that many people keep saying that I am not a native English speaker just because I wasn't born in the US and because I am not an American.

I mean, does it matter? Does our nationality really have something to do with the language we speak? There are tons of Chinese people who cannot speak Chinese at all.

Are there any professionals out there who can explain this?

Ringo
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Daniella
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    This is better addressed on /meta. Also note my edit: you need two carriage returns to separate paragraphs. – Andrew Sep 13 '17 at 15:58
  • It's odd how you failed to learn Bosnian in school (regardless of the questionable choice made by your mother) – did you go to some sort of private English elementary school and high school? –  Sep 13 '17 at 16:02
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    It would be interesting to hear what accent you have. – Peter Sep 13 '17 at 16:26
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    This seems like it's more about general language acquisition and not really about Learning English. – Catija Sep 13 '17 at 16:47
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    "Now what bothers me is that many people keep saying that I am not a native English speaker just because I wasn't born in the US and because I am not an American." Do you mean that they said this before hearing you speak, or afterwards? – user3169 Sep 14 '17 at 02:47

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