How long does it take for someone to learn the English language? Well for most it is going to be an ongoing process. This is a common question with no clear answer that is very much like asking how much money will I have in the bank if I start to save.
The more effort you apply in learning is like applying a greater effort in saving your funds, the knowledge pays for itself just as the interest on the money you deposit. The more money your deposit, the greater the interest will be, similarly the more you apply yourself to the language learning process the greater the learning dividends will be.
I have been getting this question for many years now and I try to be more creative with my answer so that I don't have to get annoyed with the lack of any specific insight and I have noticed that my answer has changed over the years.
That has probably gone along with my approach in teaching and better insight into the learning process. But people usually want short clear answers and not philosophical musings.
In short, language learning is not something that is entirely passive a certain effort is needed in the form of formal or informal training.
The approach of learning has changed over the years but the end result is the same; either the speaker becomes perfectly fluent or learns nothing or falls somewhere in between. Generally the person falls in the middle between the two extremes of being a very advanced speaker or being a cop-out.
Some people can dedicate just so much time to the learning process and if a person really wants to learn a language he is going to go further than just being functional. These days a good majority are learning English to fit their job place and once they can go through the motions of answering the questions on an interview or filling out a questionnaire, then he sees no further use to deepening his knowledge.
The question of how long it takes to learn a language is easier to answer in this case because the knowledge acquisition can be broken down to steps, which would allow the person to communicate in a specific niche.
So if the person works in phone sales a good concentration of communicative terms, opening and closing statements, how to follow up on a sale or how to conclude one would be the basic requirements.
If the person wanted to go into the nursing sciences on the other hand his language has to become more complex because of the interaction between himself and the patient, his need to refer to charts and reports, his need to make presentations and communicate the degree of a specific illness or the requirement for a follow-up, not to mention other situations, such as communicating advice or communicating with the family.
