Thread:Nep-Nep/@comment-26913812-20151014193423/@comment-24978536-20151019011112

Well, it depends on many factors really, such as motivation, how frequently the secondary language is studied or practiced, the age of the person, and simply how gifted a person is when it comes to languages. Usually people learn a secondary language in their elementary / middle school (depends on the school and country) and with enough actual participication in classes, basic conversations can probably be held after the first year of studying, though it will probably take at least a couple more years of studying (in the regular pace for those schools) to be able to hold conversations somewhat well. It has been studied that the best age for learning languages is around 9 years old - this is because kids of that age have the mental capacity to learn a secondary language, yet they lack the "restraints" that an adult may have for learning languages. These restraints come simply from the fact that teenagers and adults tend to think too much of their appearances and are not willing to try spelling the secondary language properly in fear of making a mistake. When it comes to learning languages, the best solution for learning is always to try, fail and have your mistake fixed, then try again.

However, true mastery of a secondary language is extremely difficult to achieve. Or actually, the grammatical side is not difficult to master and students of a secondary language such as English often become better at writing in English than those who speak English as their primary language (which is to a degree a result of the teaching methods which have been common to this day). However, mastering the speech of a secondary language is something that may be impossible to achieve, even if a person lives together with people who speak that secondary language as their primary language for multiple years - it is very rare that the speech will be at the same level with those who speak that language as their primary language.

The difficulty of learning the speech of a secondary language mainly comes from the fact that when we learn our first language, the "rules" of how a language works are written to our brain. However, as other languages always differ from our first language, those "rules" have to be overwritten in order to learn a secondary language, yet that is something that is very difficult to do and we keep thinking of other languages from the perspective of our own first language (or at least this is how I understood the matter from my study books).

...Sorry for the huge information dump. It is just that this all has been something what I've recently studied for my entrance exams, and I ended up giving a too detailed answer for your question as a result.