I am interested how long it took you to learn a foreign language. I am not interested in how long it took someone to acquire his or her first language or even the second language, if it happened in the early childhood, almost at the same time, which is the case with bilingual people, very often. I am interested in the time period it took someone to learn a foreign language over the age of two.

It would be nice to learn whether there were any differences in learning a third, or a fifth language, as opposed to learning the first foreign language. Did you find some languages to be easier to learn as opposed to others? Also, I am not interested in basic knowledge of the language, but rather in close to native fluency in speech and writing.

Hi, Liliana I marked 6-10 years, which includes my years in the university. It wasn't, however, until after the university years that I feel the near native fluency of L2 happened. Possibly not directly related to your poll, but somewhat related is a poll I had conducted some time back on time spent in the country of ones L2 (B) language. It will be interesting if we see any correlation between the polls. I find the myths of L2, L3, etc., language learning interesting, especially for adults that were not brought up bilingual.

David

 Time spent in country of "B" language poll:

http://www.translatorscafe.com/cafe/MegaBBS/thread-view.asp?threadid=11619&messageid=150458#150458

I sincerely do not know. They just seem to come themselves, kinda... Thanks to books, first and foremost.

Yes, I think books are great, good language books, and just regular books, meaning literature. I think they help more sometimes than classes in some schools. Also TV is not bad, if they have quality language. I think I learned a lot from TV, even my first language, I guess, to a certain extent.

Aren't you trilingual by birth, or location where you were growing up, having been born in Lithuania?

Yes, that too.

Neither. The one and only language I know perfectly is Lithuanian. I think I started learning Russian (my B) at about 4, thanks to the wonderful Russian animations - and books, of course. English, my C, I started to learn at school; books and songs by Uriah Heep, mostly... Polish, my D - at about 20; books, especially Lem, and TV, too. French, my E, was my second language at the University; books, first and foremost. And of course one has to learn Latin if one is a philology student. I picked up some German here and there, because we had some German neighbours when I was a child, and because there were German books in my parents` library, but my German is very poor. Spanish and Bulgarian - books and magazines, mostly... I can read and write and speak my A, B, C and D (terrible accent in the case of the latter, as I have found not so long ago); others I can read and, more or less, understand spoken, but I would not dare speak those myself. Yet I have translated some French fiction and some Spanish and Bulgarian articles into Lithuanian. Good translations, BTW. I did those when the publishers still used to care about the quality.

So I`m monolingual, after all.

This is great. There are some languages that I will probably never learn, even if I try. Don't you think that some languages are almost impossible to learn, of course based on individual circumstances and talents. They don't necessarily have to be the hardest languages, whereas some others come much easier. This is  all very relative, however.

Well, I think you should rephrase your question a little bit.

Do you mena speaking on a working level, intermediate level or as a linguist?
I you really want a reliable answer you should differentiate a little bit.

Being a native speaker of German I am still learning new Germish every day .

For my working languages such as English or French: just the same.

Especially a specialised translator will never be finished with learning new terminology!