How long does it take to learn a foreign language well?

The question on how long does it take to learn a foreign language well depends on several factors. Among them are a good teacher, conducive surrounding, available material, and self-attitude. There are people who take a short time to become reasonably proficient in any language, while others take a long time even with good facilities. I began to use English at the age of thirteen. The secondary school that I joined was a full boarding school with English as the language of instruction for most of the subjects. I was in an experimental group. There were thirty of us from various Malay medium primary school. The school felt there was no need for one Preparatory Year as it was normally done in other schools. We only had one extra English class per week for 4 months. They were right. After 4 months ten of us, myself included, beat most other students in English. People who have a basic understanding of English should not use a bi-lingual dictionary. Instead of helping it actually hinders attempts at gaining proficiency in English. Reading of literary works helps in understanding the nuances of the language. all the best, rosdimy

Well, for me, english is not foreign anymore because it is being taught as a subject in many countries. We may all know English language but depending on who uses it and how he/she applies it, does matter. Some people just don't care how they construct their sentence, they just type in what they want to say and never review their grammar, even they know English pretty well. Base on what I've observed, people from US, Europe and other English speaking country, may also overlooked English and just type it freely. That's why we can't judge people that if one doesn't speak/write a certain language 100% correctly, that language will be foreign to him since native speaker may also commit the same mistakes. Let me answer your primary question now :) For some people, it will take 6 months of continuous learning. For others, it might be longer or shorter. The most important factor is that you love what you're doing because if we are enjoying in these things, we can easily cope up no matter how hard or how difficult they are. For my personal experience, I know chinese since I was a kid coz my family came from Taiwan. Then I grew up in the Philippines that's why I know how to speak Filipino. My hometown is in Bicol so I do speak Bicol dialect, and for English, I learn it from school. We are trained to speak English in school since I was in primary level. For Japanese language, I learn it from watching animes and jdorama. Lastly, we were taught in college about Spanish. If you count them all, probably I knew 8 of them including the dialects. Hope this helps :)