How long time does it take to become fluent in a language?

[arilando]

How long does it take in your experience?

It took me about a year to become fluent in english.

[Nox]

Depends on how hard you study the language & what your definition of fluent is. I studied French at high school for 5 years and I can barely speak any.

[rednordman]

I misread the title and thought it initially said 'how long does it take to start flirting in another language?'. No seriously, @nox, i did the exact same as you with french. But I never wanted to learn french in the first place. If you are determined, i'd give it as little as 6 months to become reasonable competent. Although that would involve actually living in a land where they spoke the language.

[Nox]

I misread the title and thought it initially said 'how long does it take to start flirting in another language?'. No seriously, @nox, i did the exact same as you with french. But I never wanted to learn french in the first place. If you are determined, i'd give it as little as 6 months to become reasonable competent. Although that would involve actually living in a land where they spoke the language.

Yeah I never wanted to learn French either >.>

The only 2 languages I'm interested in are Russian and Albanian, and I'm already semi-fluent in Russian

[ColonelCossack]

I studied French at high school for 5 years and I can barely speak any.

This!!!! Except I did Spanish.

[arilando]

Yeah I never wanted to learn French either >.>

The only 2 languages I'm interested in are Russian and Albanian, and I'm already semi-fluent in Russian
Why on earth would you wanna learn Albanian?

[Rooster]

It really depends on the language and how much time you're willing to put into it and probably also how old you are. I became fluent in French in about five months and Gaelic in about... six? French was easier because it's more similar to English. I tried to learn German but I think to get to any sort of conversational level, I'd have to study it seriously for about a year. I'm still struggling with Polish and Italian though, despite me trying to study them for about two months each and I just can't get my head around Japanese. Some languages are naturally harder than others mainly because they use a different alphabet. Russian is really hard for me for this reason even though the language itself is fairly simple and robust. If you can speak Polish though, you can also get by in Russian (more or less). So yeah, on average, I'm going to say about 5 or 6 months of studying would get you fairly fluent. Probably less for younger people (I'm old). It really helps if you can get to visit the places where it's spoken because it forces your brain to change gear.


Why on earth would you wanna learn Albanian?

For that communist chic plus luls.

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

Why on earth would you wanna learn Albanian?

So he can sing the chant with me to revive Hoxha and liberate the world!

@OP: As people have said, there is no set amount of time it takes people to learn a language. Everyone learns, remembers, and retains differently. I am almost fluent in French after 3 years of taking it in middle school, one year in high school, and two summers with that Rosetta Stone thing.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

Don't know about the time thing, but what is the best way to start learning a language, for example I would like to learn Russian but I wouldn't know how to actually start learning the language.

[bcbm]

depends. i think it works better if you focus on learning stuff that will be useful for you in conversing and accepting that you are going to mess up and just roll with it. too much language education seems focused on getting everything correct and lots of memorizing bullshit, which i think makes people scared of learning language

[Nox]

Why on earth would you wanna learn Albanian?

Because I think it's the most fascinating and beautiful language in the world.