Foreign Language Learning Process I'm wondering, how much time does it take to learn a foreign language. How people even manage to learn more than one foreign language which aren't in the same language group perfectly? Let's talk about English. To be honest, I have been learning English for about 1.5 years from the very beginning (elementary level) but still far away from perfect knowledge of it in all aspects (reading, writing, listening, and speaking). It took huge amount of time to get into grammar as English grammar is quite different from Ukrainian's and Russian's ones (and from Slavonic languages in general). Not sure about others, but probably it goes a bit easier for instance for Poles as Polish language has an Latin alphabet at least and, at the same time, belongs to Slavonic languages. Also, English language learning process acquires constantly expanding vocabulary; learning the meanings of phrasal verbs and idioms and ways to use them. Yeah, at the first glance it looks not so hard, but without using the learned materials in practice, they simply worth nothing. Also it is important to listen to something in language you are learning. And I think it's much better if materials you listen to are informal. Formal language is also ok, but informal one is widely used. So, why I'm telling that? I had been learning German for about 5 years in school but now I can't even recall which tenses are there, without mentioning the fact that I can't speak German now at all. Why? Because I didn't have any practice in German since I graduated from school. So I mean to say that real life practice and lifelong learning are the most important requirements in successful foreign language learning process. And the last thing I want to say here is that I'm still wondering and it still remains a puzzle for me to understand how people know several languages perfectly at the same time.