It is impressive; he won the prize for for most prolific young polyglot in the country. There are very few in the world at this age who can speak 10+ languages.

It is impressive; he won the prize for for most prolific young polyglot in the country. There are very few in the world at this age who can speak 10+ languages. Are you speaking from authority as a polyglot yourself? Because I haven't heard this opinion before. The uniformity does ease the burden slightly of learning a language but it's a small role in achieving fluency. I think you could go from zero to having full command of the Spanish grammar in a couple of weeks. I did it self taught in a month or two with a Michel Thomas CDs in a single grammar thin book. If you have the mind for it, learning language structure of a Romance or Germanic language is not too much of a challenge. What then takes _years_ is vocabulary acquisition, comprehension, pronunciation, idiomatic usage, and the fast application of the grammar you've learned. For me, what took a long time was training my brain to think fast enough that I could decode the target language fast enough to hold fluent conversation and, later, get my brain fast enough thinking in the target language. This is hardly "learning local variations and nuances", it is what takes up 90%+ of reaching a "fluency" and it's something every language learner must go through, whether they already speak 1 or 8 languages. I am starting learning German, and i'm going through the same process as with Spanish. It's really not hard to laern the principals of the language, the sentence structure and verbal agreement, gender etc. But _using it at a natural speed_ so you can conversion in German - that's a mammoth job and takes months or years. Perhaps your programming anology holds, but reaching a "fluency" means you can go hours or days of coding without ever reaching for a reference document. Sure took me a long time to get there.