Recently I watched a nice video on language learning (How to learn any language in six months by Chris Lonsdale) – man claims that you can start talking in a new language in 6 months if you approach this problem right. I would say that this is overly optimistic and he means just some good conversational level, not perfect fluency, as according to my knowledge once you past your teens your chances to achieve perfect fluency are slim (though I personally never equate negligible chances to the “loud” word impossible 🙂 ).
Well, current research tells us that if you started learning new language as an adult (past your teens) then, even after investing loads of time and maybe also given some gift/predisposition to the language, you hardly achieve perfect fluency – as you most likely will be imperfect in terms of handling pronunciation and some other aspects of your non native language especially in stressful situations or when you tired. But anyway it’s not an excuse or reason for not striving to perfection.
As I did some clean up in my house I decided that it’s high time to get rid of all these English textbooks which I amassed while learning this language. So if you are more on a visual side of perception (i.e. prefer pictures to text) here is what it takes to master a language:
Though this doesn’t include university textbook and a couple of very early textbooks from classes I did afterwards (those not survived the time), class handouts, notebooks and, you know, it’s difficult to take a picture of all the work/cool time you had with these books 🙂
Anyway it’s high time to arrange English text books give away so that I can focus on French (so far I have only 3 books 🙂 ) which I’m currently learning.