Yeah I think everyone, as an adult, underestimates the immense time requirement to learn a language. I dabbled taking a course after work for a few years, basi

Yeah I think everyone, as an adult, underestimates the immense time requirement to learn a language. I dabbled taking a course after work for a few years, basically for fun. It was a.. group 4 language, lol. Looking at the foreign service stats, apparently I needed 1320 hours to have "Advanced low" average aptitude that Group 1 languages take 480 hours to achieve. It was 2 or 4 hours/week, with a few sessions a year so I would be in class maybe a total of 40 weeks/year. I did this for about 4-5 years before changing jobs & moving made it highly inconvenient. All of that added up to maybe 600 hours of classroom time. At my peak, I felt at best like a precocious 9 year old. When traveling I could sort of make my requests known in a store, restaurant or hotel.. if they person I was speaking to had the time & patience. Of course, any complex requests immediately fell apart because I had a low hit rate of understanding the clarifying questions coming back to me. Learning a language, outside of direct engagement with native speakers, on a regular daily basis.. is just extremely hard to the point of being foolhardy. For the record, I'm doubly an idiot because 20+ years ago I tried to learn another language which, of course, was also Group 4.