I'm French, everything has begun in 2014 when I started to play online video games with my friends, I used to play league of legends for so long time and world of warcraft before.
I liked to communicate with other people in using english and even sometimes in real life when forgeigners come in my country, but I wasn't very good at first.
Then in 2015 I have met in league of legends, a group of foreigners from Finland, Germany, Spain, Koweit, Serbia, and then they have invited me to play games and wanted to be on s***e with me, when discord didn't exist yet, or it was the discod begining.
First time I arrived on a call with foreigners, I had just some English basis from school, but I didn't understand anything what they say, was google translating most of things they wrote in chat trying to communicate.....
But I kept playing with them and came to vocal convs with them, days, weeks, months passed, more time passed and more I became better at understanding in vocal, at writting and also developped more vocabulary.
We also had a whatsapp group to talk about everything, we were there, 2 years passed and those people were like friends to me until one of the finnish person decided to meet me in real life in coming at my home, we spent a good summer in 2017, we hanged together, went bars, beach etc then he also came again in 2018 for the final football world cup, huge moment too.
And this is how I learnt English, and during all this time I was still meeting foreigners sometimes in my country 🤷♂️