> What methods did you use to shave off ~40 weeks

That seems slightly presumptuous and sounds slightly accusatory... It’s not like it takes 44 weeks before you can say a single word in another language. The comment said “conversational”, and the page you linked said “professional working proficiency”. Is it surprising at all if those are two completely different criteria? This is data for their own course, which is based on class hours, not on full-immersion living with a native speaker. The top of the page also stresses the words “usually” and “average”, and goes out of the way to make clear that it can vary wildly.

Try any of the decent language learning audio courses and you’ll see it’s not hard to have basic conversations in a matter of weeks. I’ve used Pimsleur for several languages. I wouldn’t call myself proficient or even conversational, but it’s been enough to communicate abroad and occasionally impress a native speaker.

That’s for state department level professional proficiency. I wouldn’t be surprised if most Americans aren’t at that level for English.

Conversational < Fluent < Fluent & Literate

There’s no magic threshold where you’ve “learned” the language, simply different points at which you are able to express yourself more accurately and in greater detail and keep up with the conversation.

The problem is "conversational" means anything from "hello", "how are you", "my name is", "the horse is on the window" [%] to an actual conversation that can convey something useful.

Between a reasonable degree of grammar correctness, some vocabulary, and the pronunciation needed to make yourself understood it takes some time to carry out any conversation beyond tourist level.

Given that I have plenty of polish friends and contact with the language the "few weeks" is either an exaggeration or, more likely, the bar for "close to conversational" is set relatively low and differs from other people's definition leading to this discussion. Unless it's someone who already speaks a language that's "close enough", maybe czech?

[%] Actual example used by my french teacher a few decades ago.

> "the horse is on the window"

Obligatory Eddie Izzard: Learning French [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/x1sQkEfAdfY

You're right, my french teacher was using "the chair is on the window", my brain mixed Eddie Izzard into it :D.

Yep. Carefully avoided the word fluent, which was never in question!

By literally walking around with two language books all the time and looking up every single word or phrase before I used it. By having a smoking hot girlfriend. By consciously trying to pronounce every word in perfect BBC Polish.

I'm surprised that list puts French in category 1, and German in category 2. Would have expected it to be the other way around.

In my experiences, learning French well is more difficult than people think, German not as much.

Spelling aside French isn’t really more difficult than Spanish. Neither language is terribly difficult when you compare it to Hebrew, Arabic, Russian or Japanese but German grammar is definitely more complex than French and that’s where most of the difficulty is in Category 1 and 2 languages, not the phoneme inventory or vocabulary, with their masses of cognates with English.

Due to the Norman conquest of England in 1066 there's a good chunk of vocabulary overlap, particularly for the more formal and technical words likely to be used in State Department contexts.

Given his insinuations, it seems like a strong infatuation helped as a motivator

More likely its bullshit or the poster just didn't have a good view of his own skills.

Quite possible -- was just pointing out what the poster had claimed was a differentiating factor, as requested

Aquisition/immersion learning is rapid. Thegovernment metrics are likely based on academic learning methods.

Forget the books and turn on the radio and TV instead.

it really depends on what languages you already know, but i think you need to use both, and not starting with a book would probably be the most inefficient way to learn a new language.

if you already know spanish or italian, learning french is a lot easier because a lot of the verbs are the same and conjugations follow the same patterns

i know english, italian, a decent amount of french now, and if I am trying to learn arabic, starting with just radio and tv seems backwards to me