Quote Originally Posted by Tellos Athenaios View Post
It's slightly more complex than that. On the whole pretty much anyone will pick up the basics out of sheer necessity: chances are your life is too complex to define in point & grunt semantics, so you need the local lingo to help you out. But there are people who consider it not necessary or not sufficiently necessary to bother with actually learning the language. I guess because they tend to migrate to a place where they will be among other people of similar backgrounds who understand their native tongue well enough.

Anyway, Lemur, learning a language beyond the basics takes rather more than two years. Ten is nearer to the mark.
I don't think this is true, if you have a basic grounding in a language (very basic) and are then immersed in the culture and forced to speak it every day you will reach fluency somewhere between 6 months and a year. If this was not so we wouldn't be able to send in English students to France or Germany and dump them into the Universities there, which we do.