I would suggest that guy has a brain unlike most other people's brains and his achievements will be about as reproducible by the average person as the achievements of Usain Bolt are. Do the course and give me a call in 3 months time. I promise you won't know what the fuck I'm saying.

Italians can learn Spanish in 3 months because they're so similar, going on to learn French and Portuguese as an Italian who speaks Spanish would also be piss easy. Then if you moved on to one of the Germanic languages it would be not too much effort because your understanding of grammar would be next level and most of the vocabulary would exist in one form or other in another language you speak. Honestly, the bar of 'fluency' isn't that high and is really far away from mastery.

I speak Spanish with fluidity. Any native would call me fluent. I speak it better than any Brits here I've met. Nevertheless I make tonnes of errors and there's whole groups of tenses I just don't use and my vocabulary has gaps. So if someone tells me "I should have had a spanner" I wouldn't know what the fuck they were saying because I don't know the Spanish for spanner and then because phrases like "I should have had..." are rather more complicated and nuanced than we realise when only speaking our native tongue. Like, for sure, no one reading this can give an off the cuff explanation as to why the construction "I should have had..." comes to be understood the way it is.

So, despite being what is called fluent, I don't have mastery over the language. In normal discourse this is hardly problematic. However, things like reading legal documents is a real chore involving dictionaries and multiple rereadings and after a few paragraphs you get mentally burnt out. In this way it narrows your scope because certain tasks slow you down considerably and time is not an infinite resource, nor is mental effort and so on.

Or in a more basic example, it's not like I could just go work in a random call centre for a month or two if I got into financial difficulty. After a few weeks I'd probably have tidied up enough and got used to the things customers say and so on... but that's not how employers hire. In the UK, I'd walk into any such role even if I was half asleep, in my PJs, insulted the interviewer and was visibly drunk.

Not that I want such a job.


Peace,

kowalski