rollybooz

I guess it really depends on how often you use it. If you're learning a language and trying to use it on a daily basis, which many of us don't especially if you are not staying/exposed frequently to native speakers, then you naturally will pick it up faster as the natives are there to correct your pronunciations/sentence structures on the spot. If you are only learning it online or speaking it to yourself/another fellow learner, chances are you may reinforce your own mistakes with one another! Being a native English and Mandarin speaker, I embarked on picking up German at a language school. However, that process took me about 4 years because I was only speaking German twice a week for 3 hour sessions! It does not help that the grammar for German is so much more complex than that of English (to me at least ). My advice is to not think about how long you need to be proficient, but to be daring enough to use the new language as much as you can and get corrected by the natives. Eventually, you'll realise that you're actually not too bad anymore! Enjoy the process!