Language-learning is broken and remains to be a VERY complex problem. There are so many factors involved - language complexity, understanding of culture, studen

Language-learning is broken and remains to be a VERY complex problem. There are so many factors involved - language complexity, understanding of culture, student's age & ability to learn... I'm convinced that learning a language without complete immersion in culture is doable for easy languages such as English, French, Spanish, but almost impossible for Mandarin, Russian, Polish and others. I'm a native Russian speaker and i can confidently tell you that 70% of native Russian speakers cannot speak proper Russian, mangle vocabulary and sentence structure. I'd say something like 90% cannot use proper grammar. This is after 11 consecutive years of taking Russian in elementary, middle and high schools. This got really bad after the collapse of Soviet Union, which took Russia's impressive Soviet-era education system with it. Obviously, the older you are the worse it gets. I took English lessons for 4 years in Russia. In the end, i could barely put a sentence together. After immigrating to the US, I picked up English at 14 in less than a year and got to the point of losing any kind of identifiable accent. If i tried to learn it today i would likely never reach the level of fluency i'm enjoying now. Having said that, I've only ran into one American who actually spoke Russian possibly better than I did (my Russian is significantly worse now than at 14). It was an intelligence agent who interviewed my father when we came to the US 14 years ago. So our government likely has a few tricks up their sleeves.