You Can’t Learn It In A Book
If you ask people how long it takes to learn a language, they might give you an answer in years. “10 years” or maybe “You never stop learning”. But this is not very helpful for charting out someone’s path to fluency or “communicative competency”.
The Boyfriend Method
Many think language learning happens as a linear, academic process – Take level 1-5 and you can finish in 2 years of classes – while taking 12 units of other college classes. Even people who can speak another language relatively well might tell you that they learned in classes, but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll almost always find that they’ve had significant “relational immersion” experience.