October 17, 200619 yr Well, now that I think of it, it actually took me probably way more than that to learn English which is my third language, and that includes everything I've learned and seen from age 0 to 14, and even then I wasn't 100% fluent. At about age 16 I started to be able to speak and write it with no punctuational or grammatical errors. I think it's very possible to learn a language fluently in 4 years especially when you spend half the day studying it; I can't remember the guy in the Guinness book of records but he could even learn Icelandic in just a matter of days (though that just means conversational skills, not fluency). That study doesn't mention languages either, just "skills" like music, sports, chess, etc. I assume that perfecting your knowledge of a secondary language (which you have not been hearing since your birth) would take way more than 4 years and in some cases almost impossible. The sooner you start learning languages the better, I can imagine that an average person age 50+ wont be even capable of learning languages up to a level of total fluency.
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